A lot of webmasters use pictures on their websites. And a lot of the time they get copyrighted photos from Google Images or MSN Images. Most photos you find on the internet are not legally allowed to be copied and used on your website without the permission of the photographer. This is especially true for pictures of celebrities. Sure everyone uses pictures without permission, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

There are places you can find legal pictures to use. Flickr is one of my favorites. They have millions of photos that a perfectly legal to use on a commercial website. Here’s how you find them:

  • From the Flickr home page, enter your keyword into the search
  • After you click ‘Search’ your results will come up
  • From there click ‘Advanced Search’
  • Next click ‘Only search Creative Commons-licensed photos’
  • Then click ‘find content to use commercially’

Then all the results that come up after that search are able to be used on your website. The box you click that says ‘use commercially’ means that it can be used on a website with ads on it.

Another really cool website you can use to find Creative Commons photos is called Yotophoto.

So next time you’re looking for cool pictures for a website or wallpapers, check out the legal Creative Commons photos first. You may surprise yourself with all the high quality pics on Flickr that you can find.