Flickr is a free, online picture and video sharing website that is used by both professional and amateur photographers.
There are millions of pictures available to view but not all of them are available to use.
When people upload their files to Flickr they can decide which licence to share them under. This is set to All rights Reserved as default but many users choose a Creative Commons licence to share with and these are the pictures you may be able to use.
This is a joint venture between Flickr and the US Library of Congress. It aims to provide public access to thousands of archived photographs and allow for people to comment and add information to them.
By participating in the project, institutions have to declare that there are ‘no known copyright restrictions’ on the photographs and as such you will be able to use them in your blog. Many of the pictures are of a historical nature and are from institutions around the globe.
I can’t see clearly whether a specific attribution needs to be made with pictures holding a ‘no known copyright restrictions’ licence so make sure you at least link to the picture on Flickr if you use one.
You can search for images with a Creative Commons licence on Flickr relatively easily. The most recent 100 pictures for each CC licence are displayed and you can enter search terms to find something specific.
To use a picture, click on in and then the ‘share’ button on the bottom right of the screen. There you will be able to copy the HTML for your blog post. The picture will link back to Flickr. For the correct attribution you will need to include the name of the creator and a link to the details of the licence they are using. This link can be found by clicking ‘some rights reserved’ under the flickr member’s details.
photo credit: Peter A Levey cc
This is undeniably a more difficult way of doing it than using a service like Photopin, but sometimes if you find a picture that’s not quite right and look at what else the Flickr member has in their photostream you may be find more options.
Both Flickr and Creative Commons have useful help files for using images properly.