TMoRP – Stock Images

For nearly all these Month of Relentless Positivity posts, I’ve been using stock photos used under a Creative Commons license, so today I just wanted to give a shout out to the source.

Forest

Forest

Pixabay is a hosting site for tens of thousands of high quality photographs, photo-manipulated images and illustrations, all catalogued and tagged for ease of searching. They are available for use under a Creative Commons CCO license, which means they can be used freely and without attribution to the artist for any purpose – even modification or in a commercial product.[1]

The artists who supply the photos can receive tips from grateful users but are not otherwise compensated for the use of their work. (I pay a small gratuity for most of the images I use here, although I admit I’m a bit inconsistent about it).

And the thing I want to point out is that some of these images are just breathtakingly beautiful. I mean, we all remember that fox from a couple of weeks back, right?

Or this cat

Or this cat

Like Pinterest (whose users have a much less rigid attitude towards the minutiae of copyright ownership), any search term can lead down a rabbit hole of spellbinding and captivating imagery. And also sometimes some Not Safe For Work stuff, *coughporncough* so maybe make sure you check out the Safe Search filter options.

Anyway, accidental “erotica” aside, for anyone wanting to dress up a blog or make their Facebook posts a little less samey, which still not making use of someone’s art without their permission, I can’t recommend Pixabay highly enough. Or check out this post on Makeuseof.com which conveniently lists all the sites I would otherwise have mentioned.

If you’re going professional with your blogging – and I cannot fathom the circumstances in which someone doing that would be reading this post – you could also check out paid subscription equivalents like Shutterstock or iStock. (Or any one of dozens of equivalents)

For the rest of us, the free stuff like this should be more than sufficient.

Spooky

Spooky

 

[1] But I am not an internet lawyer, so do your own due diligence on the limits of the license

 

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