How to Find and Use Free Photo Images with Flickr

October 6, 2008 by Kathy Drewien · View Comments
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts 

One of the best pieces of advice I received early in my blogging: Use photos to attract reader attention to posts.

Photo by nattu

The images used in posts capture the reader. And, we all want to capture reader attention, right?

So, where do you find great photo images to use freely?

In this post I’ll tell you how to find the best free images on Flickr to use in your blog posts, eBooks, brochures or anything else.

Flickr hosts millions of photos taken by professional and amateur photographers. The best images are richly detailed, vibrant, and inspirational. Images on Flickr fall under a traditional copyright or a Creative Commons license.

Find images on Flickr to freely use

You are not allowed to use copyrighted images without express permission. Who has time for that? If you are like me, the need for a perfect image to use in a post is when I’m writing the post. So, let me tell you about the Creative Commons license to freely use Flickr images.

Non-copyright images on Flickr are available under a different kind of license called Creative Commons. Each image is available under one of six different licenses. For our purposes, we’ll focus on one license.

Attribution License

The images I use come under the Attribution License. You are free to modify the images — crop or caption, for example — as long as you credit the original source with a link back to their Flickr profile.

Find best images on Flickr to freely use

The starting point to find the best free photo images on Flickr is the Attibution License page. Clicking the Flickr Attribution License link navigates to a new window or tab depending on your browser settings.

  1. Search the keyword appropriate to your needs. To test, search the keyword ‘orange’. Flickr will search the image tags and return the 27,500+ ‘most relevant’ images. But, don’t stop here.
  2. Look for the ‘most interesting’ link below the displayed number of images. Click ‘most interesting’ to change the display. Most often you will see images of a much higher quality.
  3. Right click the image to copy or save.
  4. Copy the link location to credit the original source profile.
  5. Within seconds you have a targeted image to use in your blog post — or whatever suits your needs.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out the Multicolr Search Lab Flickr Set. Using visual similarity technology you can search Flickr images by color (colour).


Photo by Kyle May