A great photo can make a lot of difference when it comes to promoting your content. Just as well is adding several images to your posts, to break up long blocks of text, recommended.
Finding images isn't always as straightforward as it sounds though. All too often people will just look for images in Google and then use those images without checking the license for the images.
Sometimes, "Lazy Wannabe Ethical Writers™️" will do as if they're ethical and link to the Google search result as source.
Did I say lazy? 🤦♂️
Dan Gold on Unsplash
Luckily, the Internet hosts several websites which offer royalty-free images one can use. Use at no cost at all and without risking to get a nasty mail from a litigation lawyer or shaming comments from the copyrights holder. Use commercially ven.
Use in your Steem posts.
1. Unsplash
Our personal favorite, and apparently not too popular among Steemians a location for free images, is the awesome Unsplash.
Unsplash is a beautiful website hosting thousands and thousands of high-resolution photos in original size, uploaded by great photographers. Unsplash has a great serach engine, often also suggesting user made collections for specific search queries.
When visiting Unsplash, make sure to not suffer slow internet connection because it isn't uncommon for images to be 15MB large or larger even!
All images are free to be downloaded and licensed under the Do whatever you want license.
The most open license available online. The one and only license to rule them all.
All photos published on Unsplash can be used for free. You can use them for commercial and noncommercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash, although it is appreciated when possible.
More precisely, Unsplash grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Unsplash.
That's right, if you think that your writing is too awesome to also place an attribution link, Unsplash has your back covered. @steemcleaners may grind their teeth at such behavior, and we also recommend to at least attribute the photographer with a subtle link, because it's the nice thing to do and provides exposure for the photographer, but it isn't required.
Interestingly enough, Unsplash started as a side-marketing project on Tumblr, with a free Tumblr theme, soon amassing millions of monthly page views per month.
Pixabay
Pixabay is undoubtedly the favorite of the current Steemians and there's a good reason for it.
Aside from hosting around a million of images, Pixabay also offers illustrations, vector graphics, videos, and much more.
On Pixabay it is important to check out the license for each photo as not every photo is royalty-free and many other photos do not allow commercial use, which prevents them from being used on Steemit.
Other photos may require attribution, quite some photos on Pixabay are licensed under one of the different Creative Commons licenses, although most images are licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 license and can thus be used commercially.
StockSnap
StockSnap is another popular provider of high-resolution royalty-free images. A nice touch to the StockSnap site is that you can browse images by popularity and by trending tags or by most recent uploads.
StockSnap was created by the people who also made Snappa, the online image editor and the handy tool to create social media size-optimized images. Photographers can also easily upload their photos to StockSnap.
If you don't use Buffer's Pablo for your social media images, you may want to check out Snappa.
All photos submitted to and offered on StockSnap are licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 license, also known as the public domain commons. This means that you can do whatever you want with the images.
PhotoPin
PhotoPin is a slightly different photo resource in the sense that it is a search engine for Creative Commons photos. PhotoPin searches the Flickr library using Flickr's API.
What is amazing about PhotoPin is the speed with which it returns results, often faster than Yahoo! manages themself on the Flickr site!
Sadly enough, PhotoPin returns images under all different Creative Commons licenses, thus you still need to visit the original image at Flickr and verify whether the image can be used commercially.
Because of that limitation, people may prefer to use the advanced search feature of Flickr to find royalty-free images allowed to use commercially. Personally though we do love the preview feature of PhotoPin and its ultrafast results.
FindA.Photo
Do URLs get any simpler than FindA.Photo? Yes, that's the URL!
Not a .com, not a .io but a .photo.
Find A Photo. Get it?
FindA.Photo is another search engine for Creative Commons photos but, unlike PhotoPin, FindAPhoto returns ONLY photos licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 license, the aforementioned public domain commons license. Thus all images returned by FindA.Photo can be used commercially and in your Steemit articles.
FindA.Photo has a slightly different approach to its search offering too in the sense that it allows you to browse images by color, by collection, or even by source. FindA.Photo sources its images from different online photography sites, such as our favorite Unsplash and also Life of Pix, and many more.
While FindA.Photo makes downloading images for commercial use easier than PhotoPin, the latter does return many more results. Even Unsplash does offer more images than the aggregator search engine FindA.Photo which also crawls Unsplash.
We hope that the above sites will provide all Steemians with all royalty-free photos they will ever need.
All that's left to do now, and that's a big task, is to convince @ned to convince the Buffer and/or Snappa crew to also provide the appropriate image size for Steemit cover images.
Alternatively just crop your images to 800px by 464px. ;)
You didn't think I was going to say to include image search results in the editor, did you? I may be a dreamer, but I'm a bloody realistic one. :P