Flickr.com, Yahoo.com, and Google (and now Bing.com) can be great places to find images of just about anything under the sun. Unfortunately, many of the images you find are the intellectual property of someone else– so you can’t include them with having to worry about being hauled up in copyright court.

Creative Commons to the rescue! Many bloggers know about the brilliant IP license which enables content creators (like the person who owns that picture you want) to allow their work to be distributed, modified, and even resold under a “some rights reserved” license. This frees bloggers to freely use the vast treasure of images, sounds, and multimedia on the internet to build and create something new. Add to the mix the vast libraries of public domain content available through a wikimedia license and you have a treasure trove of usable images.

I’m still waiting for “one free image search engine to rule them all”, but until then, I will have to settle for the best wiki collection of free image sources anywhere. Check out Copyright Friendly’s exhaustive list of great image resources for some gorgeous free images. As always, double-check to be sure that the images you are using are CC, public domain, or otherwise legal to include into your blog.

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