One of the biggest challenges i face as a blogger is trying to find appropriate images for a blog post. I made the decision a long time ago to try and include images in all my blog posts as i believe it looks good and breaks up chunks of text nicely.

I am a member of several stock images sites, but the quality and quantity can be pretty poor & there’s no way i’m paying to get images

photo credit: erindipity!

Flickr is a great source of free images, however most of them require attribution which is a pain in the backside as it means you have to manually grab links and go back and forth between flickr and your blog. I’m not sure if mulley uses a flickr plugin for his attribution, but i’ve always been envious of his photos.

I *could* use flickr photos, using a CC search engine and manually link back to the flickr member but that’s too time consuming to be honest. I’ve no problem giving attribution, but it’s just too much hassle hence the reason i try to use free stock images where possible.

Anyway, thanks to a plugin called ‘PhotoDropper‘ i can now use flickr photos on this blog and have the plugin auto-add attribution for me The other great thing about this plugin is that i don’t have to leave the blog to find photos on flickr – there’s an in built search feature which pulls images from flickr for you

Apart from saving time, it also helps protect me from any licensing issues which may pop up. The blog is still pretty small at the minute but for any sort of large / commercial blog, this plugin could be a lifesaver

photo credit: Aidan McMichael

Update; turns out mulley uses Jazzbiscuit’s Flickr tool which looks pretty slick – check it out.

Aidan also pointed out a Firefox plugin called zemanta which looks very promising indeed… drag n drop type stuff.