15 Great Sites for Legal, Free Content

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[Updated June 2018 by Laurel Devoto]

You don’t have to spend a bundle to get great free and legal content for your website. Photos, videos, sounds, and vectors are available for free online without breaking the bank or the law. Knowing where to find high-quality, relevant content is a great way to improve your website or blog and make it more interesting for visitors. Without spending a dime, you can still use high-quality images on your blog to improve reader engagement and help make your blog posts look more attractive. There are so many sites that offer a variety of licensing options to suit any project.

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The Dangers of Offloading Images

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Previous on my site, I discussed the benefits of embedding images into your blog rather than hosting them yourself.

But while there are many reasons to embed your images, there are also reasons to think twice before doing so. Posting your images on a third party site, such as Flickr, PhotoBucket or Webshots provides you some protections, but also costs you some rights. By introducing a third party into the equation, you subject yourself to a whole new set of licensing terms, some of which may cost you dearly.

That’s why, before uploading your image or other media to your favorite hosting site, it is worthwhile to take a moment and understand what rights you are giving up and decide if it truly is worth it. [Read more…]

Skitch: Screenshots Made Easy

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When it comes to blogging, there are very few tools I feel compelled to rave about or wonder how I got along without.

For example, I edit my sites with Mars Edit because it is easier and faster. However, I am just as comfortable with my browser and the vanilla WordPress editor as they get the job done just the same.

Skitch, however, is an exception to that rule and is both a tool that makes my life much more simple and a great service that I don’t know how I got along without.

For any blogger (on a Mac) that takes a modest amount of screen grabs or likes embedding images into his hosts, Sktich provides an easy and powerful service that combines capture, editing and hosting all within the same application. For me, it has sped up the process of taking screen captures and enabled me to include many more in my posts.

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Digital Fingerprints For Images: Detecting Image Theft for Free

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Photobloggers, typically, have a much more difficult time detecting misuse of their content than writers.

This is because the Internet was built first and foremost for sharing text, and nowhere is this more clear than when we search for something on the Web. It doesn’t matter if we’re doing an image or video search, we’re using text to describe what we want and locating it based upon descriptions and tags.

Though this is very effective for delivering us types of content, it doesn’t work as well for finding duplicates. Once a photo is copied, content creators have little control what text is attached to it or appears around it.

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