Rather than tell you in words – here are two I made in a matter of moments. (Click here to make your own.)

There are many available under creative commons licence on flickr. A tool I find useful to search flickr is flickrcc. It’s a simple online tool that will search for creative commons flickr photos. You can read more about it in a blog post I wrote. A couple of other useful flickr search tools are Compfight and Search flickr by colour.

Or simply go to flickr and use the search box. Be sure you check the copyright conditions – see the right hand column of the page. Many are available under creative commons but you must include the link and/or attribution. If they have an “All Rights Reserved” copyright you may not use them. Below is an example of a flickr photo used in one of my presentations – with the link back to the photo at the bottom of the slide (click on the photo for a larger version):

Wikimedia Commons is a database of 7,035,164 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

Commercial sites

iStockphoto – you can buy photos for $1 but every week they have a free photo – just sign up (it’s free) & collect the free photos. You can see some of the images in a slideshow I put together:

Other commercial sites are:

1. MorgueFile

2. Photl.com

3. stock.xchng

4. FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Enjoy…..

All you do is choose the ‘effect’ you want & then upload a photo of your face. You get the choice of downloading the new photo, making it an avatar or publishing it. You can even order a print.

I played around with a couple and below are the results.

With some creativity you could use this app to make some interesting photos of your business or your products. I played about and came up with those below. (For the purposes of this exercise I just ran a search for free images at freedigitalphotos)

If you sell jewellery what about something like this:

Bracelet Image: Tina Phillips / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

And if you make and sell handbags – why not feature your bags on vogue!

Handbag Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So – off you go – get creative & share what you c0me up with. Make your own.

Thanks to Dan Coulter for something he calls Simple CC flickr Search. Here’s how it works…..

When you go to the Simple CC flickr Search webpage you can type a tag and then search on it. After a few moments you’ll be given a whole page of photos that you can use according to their CC license. Not only that – by clicking on the thumbnail of the photo you’ll see a pop up box which gives you some code & shows you what the picture will look like when you put it on your webpage – with the attribution to the photographer. BEWARE – make sure you understand CC licenses before you start using these photos all over the place. Some have restrictions on them.

Who are these photographers? Mostly people just like us who are happy to share their work with the world. (Actually they’re a bit more creative than I am!!!)

Just copy the code and paste it onto your web page. For example – to do that on this blog I simply click on the HTML edit button & copy it in. Then I return to ‘visual’ editing ie what you see is what you get – and there it is. Just think how some of these photos could liven up your website, blog or emails. Here are some to tempt you:

oh, cherry by atomicshark
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Soy distinto ¿y qué? / I’m different, so what? by Claudio.Ar
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License