I like reading blogs, and one thing I do like when reading/looking at a post is the use of a image/photo that is relevant to the post to capture my attention and break up the article into manageable sections. Using images/photos adds life, colour and content to your site. For me, the largest source of free usable photos and images has to be flickr. One issue with Flickr, is not to infringe the copyright of someone's image and to credit the owner if you wish to use an image. To manually add credits to a photo by copy/pasting links etc. would take all day so I needed to find a way to automate this and speed things up!

For something like this, there's no point trying to reinvent the wheel so I looked at other blogs to see what they used and also did the old trusted google search for "add flickr images to your blog". As a result, I came up with a ready made plugin from photodropper.com. Here's how Photo Dropper works:

It searches for Creative Commons licensed photos - images that are licensed for shared use - and lets you drop them into your posts - right from your dashboard with just 1 click.

That'll do nicely! It's only takes two minutes to set up and is easy to configure. There's a built in search functionality that let's you search for images right from your WordPress dashboard. To center align the images I configured Photo Dropper to wrap my images inside a paragraph and set up the text align as centered, like so:

One thing I did notice is that the keyword search did not match a direct search from the flickr site itself. I posted my first image from flickr yesterday. When I selected the image yesterday I searched for "Twitter" on the flickr main page and that's what I came up with. However, when I searched for "Twitter" from the Photo Dropper keyword search tool I could not find the same image when I went to update the credits. To combat this I went back to flickr and did then search again. I then pulled out some of the tags under the image I choose and searched for the tags in the Photo Dropper keyword searched tool and got a match. This is no biggie and I'm sure there's plenty of images to be found directly from the Photo Dropper search engine but if I can't find anything suitable I know i may be able to use this method again!

Hopefully the inclusion of Photo Shopper can play a small part in adding some of the following attributes to my blog and between this blog and it's readers

photo credit: Mexicanwave

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 8:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.