Flickr has a fantastic collection of photos shared by amateur and professional photographers. You can use a lot of these photos on your website under a Creative Commons license as long as you credit the author with a link back to his/her page.
The large photo at the top of my homepage came from Flickr, and I’ve linked to the photographer’s page in the footer of this site.
So let’s get started:
- Head over to Flickr.com.
- You can browse and download without signing in, but you’ll probably see some photos that you want to mark as Favorites, and you can only do that if you’re signed in. Flickr is owned by Yahoo, so if you have a Yahoo email address just go ahead and sign in with it. Otherwise, create your free account.
- What kind of images are you looking for? Let’s try sunsets, so type “sunsets” into the search box and Flickr will return a list of photos. The first image below (click to enlarge) shows the original search results, and the second image filters the results to show photos that are allowed for Commercial Use.
- Now browse through and find a photo you look. This one looks pretty good, so click on the photo to open it up and this is what you get (click to enlarge ):
- If you like it and want to save it to your Favorites, click the little star icon until it turns solid white.
- Clicking the little down-arrow shows you what sizes are available to download, and clicking on any of those sizes causes the photo to download to your hard drive.
- Right below that you see a copyright notice that says “Some rights reserved”. Clicking on that link opens up the Creative Commons License which indicates that you are free to share or adapt the photo for any purpose, as long as you give appropriate credit.
That’s all there is to it. Now go find some photos!