A decade later, in 2018, Flickr was sold to the relatively unknown company SmugMug. There was no Instagram or Unsplash around, and essentially that's what Flickr could have become. Go to Flickr and add the keyword to your image search.Ĭlick on the drop-down behind “Any license” and select “All creative commons”.In 2007, Flickr was the most popular dedicated photo-sharing site on the web, and growing exponentially in terms of new images uploaded. Most images found on Google Search are NOT under a Creative Commons license.

Note: Even for images that are not for “direct commercial usage”, you can only legally use pictures in your blog posts that are under some kind of Creative Commons license. Please read through the CC’s legal definition of “non-commercial” and make your own informed decisions.If you want to play it safe, you should only search for images that allow “commercial” usage.

But again, this is a gray area with no legal precedent. It can be argued that a blog post with affiliate links or AdSense ads is indeed a “direct commercial purpose”. That said, there is a legal gray area between what is considered “commercial”. But if you use the picture in a blog post as a means of enhancing that post (and there’s no direct monetary gain from that post), then it’s not a “commercial purpose”. For instance, if you use the picture in a banner ad (enticing people to click), it is “commercial use”. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but it’s my understanding that “commercial purposes” means a direct monetary gain.

We want to search for images with a “Creative Commons (CC)” license. This will give us the photographs which are legally allowed to be used for commercial and non-commercial purposes. Using the Flickr “advanced search” option, you can find images based on these licenses. How To Use Flickr Advanced Search To Find Free Images For Blogsįlickr is an image sharing website where people upload their images and add in a license. How To Find Blog Images Using Google Image Search.But beyond the royalty-free image collections, there are many websites where all you have to do is give a source link back to the original poster.Īll you have to do to use an image for commercial purposes is give credit to the original photograph.

Free flickr photos