photo credit: Julie, Dave & Family

There isn’t a blogger out there who doesn’t use images-I mean photographs-to transform their site from something akin to a book into a true multimedia experience. It’s part of the compelling nature of blogging for both readers and content creators that these sites of ours are not limited to text. And after all if you have something to share a picture can convey so much.

We face a dilemma though, when it comes to putting photos into blogs. If you do a lot of photography or if your purpose for blogging is to showcase your own photography, you may never feel the desire to use photos taken by others. But for the vast majority of bloggers, even those of us who do take our own photos, using a photograph that has inspired us or that conveys a point in a post that we create is often a temptation.

The fact is that there are different categories of rights that are applied to a photo that appears on the web. Many photos you find online are off-limits for  uncredited commercial republishing, i.e. using them for your own blog, as they would be if you owned an offline magazine and appropriated and used images you found in other publications without permission.

Many people do simply take these online photos and place them on their sites, but in addition to leaving themselves open for possible legal action, using the creative efforts of others without their permission is stealing, whether we care to admit it or not. Crediting the owner of a photo in an attempt to sidestep this fact is of no consequence if permission was not explicitly granted, and let’s face it, you’re probably not going to attempt to find out who owns rights to the image, much less ask for permission to use it.

Why have I taken 300 words just to explain the basic problem of finding images to use on a blog? Because for years I had no good solution. I have nowhere near enough variety in my own photos to address the needs of my blogs, and a fast, simple way to find quality photos that have been OK’ed for general commercial usage by their owners, has eluded me. This all drives home why the solution to the problem, which I am about to share with you, is indeed a very valuable resource and time saver.

photo credit: JoeChavez

The Photodropper plug-in for WordPress is an absolutely fantastic way to find free, high-quality photographs to use for your blog, quickly. Photos that you find through it have no rights issues because every single one of them has been designated as being under the Creative Commons license by the photographer, which allows you to use and even modify them, as long as you give credit. After it helps you find a photo and use it, Photodropper automatically put a small text credit underneath the image.

Here’s how it works: simply search and install the plug-in through your WordPress dashboard. When you do a post and you’d like to place a photograph that is somehow related to your subject or just to set a visual tone, simply hit the Photodropper icon. Enter a keyword that describes what you have in mind. You’ll be presented with thumbnails of photographs from the Flickr catalog that you may use, that are tagged with the keyword you typed in. If I type in an obscure keyword or one that describes an abstraction, I may be presented with very few choices, but if I keep it concrete I’ll often get dozens of choices.

The quality here is often very, very good. Granted, there is also a lot of mediocrity as well. But it’s a very rare case where I don’t find something usable and fitting to a post that I am doing.

Photodropper lets me choose from three different sizes of images, and as I say the photographer credit pops in automatically.

photo credit: Miguel Virkkunen Carvalho

By enabling photographers to designate photos as being licensed as Creative Commons, Flickr encourages exposure of good photographers based on the merit of their photos as determined by millions of Flickr users. While the images find fitting homes all over the Internet, making bloggers’ lives easier, creative people whose work might have remained unknown can get some help in establishing themselves as photographers.

What blogging tools have you found to help the task of adding photographs to your blog articles and posts? With all the WordPress plug-ins out there it wouldn’t surprise me if even better tools than Photodropper are now available. I would love to hear what’s worked for you-please let us all know in the comments.

Today I want to tell you about an absolutely terrific blogging plug-in that allows you to turn your blog or website into a multimedia experience simply by installing it. First, it has been incorrectly called a Wordpress plugin before, but the fact is that it can be installed on blogs that useBlogger, MoveableType, Typepad, as well as Drupal sites, self-hosted Wordpress blogs and many other platforms as well.

Anyway, I’m not just talking about adding photographs, video or Google maps. If you have not heard of Apture, get ready to be just a little bit overwhelmed by the new possibilities for your blog.

What if there was a way, when you write a post about any subject under the sun, for you to transform any word in your post into a link that is a further jumping off point to any one of over 50 authoritative content sources, like NPR, IMBD, Wikipedia, and the New York Times? Apture is a way to add background information to your post without having to research to get the data and find specific links. Maybe this blog post is already giving you the idea. This free blogging plug-in has been invaluable for me on sites that I have that have to do with Bali travel, people, or more technical subjects like web programming as well. It’s not that I’m too lazy to dig up facts to corroborate my point (well okay, maybe I am pretty lazy), but why duplicate effort if the New York Times has an excellent article on a museum or IMBD has extra facts about a movie I have reviewed? Apture gives you away to fill out the information or opinion that you are putting forth, extra information to complement what you’re writing about, so that subjects that are peripheral to your point but maybe still interesting to your readers can be easily covered.

One feature that I have to mention is how Apture lets you clip only the portion of a YouTube video that is relevant to your post, or that you care to show… very cool.

The only downside with Apture might be that you are tempted to overuse it. I suppose it’s possible that the substance of your post could be diluted by all the extra information you are linking to. But used sparingly, I think it really has to enhance your readers’ experience. I urge you to try the Apture plug-in: what a great blogging add-on it is.