Using Images

Part of your blog that gives it color are all the images you use in your posts. Sometimes a picture alone can do the whole post justice.

When choosing photos to use, I recommend you searching the web carefully until you really have what you want. There's no meaning to having a bad photo when you can have a good one, so take your time, it makes the post so much better.

Copyrights On Images
All images have copyrights to the owner or photographer of the image. So without permission, it's practically against the law to use them in books, catalogs, websites, and etc. However, once the image is in the public domain, anyone is allowed to use them for their own purposes. Now is the internet considered part of the public domain? Not exactly. So does that mean everyone blogging is practically breaking the law? Not exactly either.

To explain all of this, there is a section in the Copyright Laws that is called Fair Use. Fair Use generally lets you use copyrighted work without permission and is determined as fair use with these guidelines:

-The purposes and character of the use, including whether the use is primarily commercial in nature;

-The nature of the copyrighted work being borrowed from;

-The amount and importance of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;

-The effect on the potential market or value of the copyrighted work.

Does Fair Use Really Work?
There isn't a clear way of determining if you are safe under Fair Use, but there are several cases that you can look at here. Most fashion/entertainment bloggers usually use photos for news reporting, critiscsm, etc, and as long as you don't use it for commercial uses, you're on the safer side. But does that guarantee that you'll be safe no matter what? I know no one wants to hear this, but no.

What Kind of Photos Can I Use?
There's many sites that provide free photos such as Free Photos Bank. Another great place to find copyright-free photos is Flickr's Creative Commons section.

There's also a nice site called PicApp that supplies you with photos of almost anything. PicApp is great because they provide you with great photos of celebrities for instance that usually would have a copyright on them, but what PicApp does is put a small ad around the picture so that you don't have to pay any money for the photo nor will you get in trouble for using it. However, some say photos from PicApp load slowly, so if you're going to try it just be prepared for loading to be slower than usual.

If you don't mind spending some money on photos, especially of celebrities, there are cheap places like PR Photos or Getty Images.