How to Get Free Open Source Photos for Your Website and Presentations

Visuals aids such as photos, are very important because they help you pass information and feelings, attract attention, maintain concentration, and help explain abstract concepts. Most professional presenters use photos and other images in their presentation. I personally find that the audience is better tuned when I present images than words.
The problem is that most images cost money – most photographers want you to pay royalties for the images you use.
Lucky enough, there are many images released under an open source license called creative commons

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001.

Many of the licenses, notably all the original licenses, grant certain “baseline rights”, such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work without changes, at no charge. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_licenses)

Where to get photos and images released under Creative Commons?

This is where I find my photos and imagery for my presentation and sites:

1. Go to flickr advance search page (http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/)
2. Tic the “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” option
3. Optionally, Tic “Find content to use commercially”
4. Optionally, tic “Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon”
5. Enter the search term for the photos (e.g “computers”)
6. Choose your image, use it

Important to note

Don’t forget to link back to the photo and comply with the license terms

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