My favorite source of images

I'm going through Course 2, Lesson 6 (the one about the images), and there are some great sources provided in there for royalty free images and photos. But my main source for obtaining royalty free images isn't really mentioned.

That's right. You can just use Google to find the perfect royalty free images to use

Did you know you don't have to go to any particular site to find an image you can freely use on your blog? It's true! You can just put your search term in Google Images (images.google.com) and find it that way. But you have to be sure the images you're getting are truly free to use, and here's how to do that.

For the sake of this demonstration, I'm going to search for cute kitten pictures.

Here's what I come up with when I type "cute kitten pictures" in the search box at images.google.com.

We're not done yet, though, because NOT ALL THESE IMAGES ARE ROYALTY FREE!

You'll need to take an extra step or two.

Under the blue, underlined word "Images" there are several drop-down menus. You're going to want to select the one that says "Usage rights," and then choose "Labeled for reuse with modification." Note: This rights category gives you the most room to play around with (i.e., it gives you permission to take a photo and add text to it or change it in some other way before using it). This is the option I always choose when I'm searching for images to use in my blog posts.

Now you'll notice our image selections have changed somewhat.

All these images are completely free to use, and most don't require any attribution at all. If you click on some of the pictures, you'll notice that some come from Wikimedia and the other sources mentioned in the training, as well as some other sources that weren't mentioned at all (like Pixabay - I LOVE Pixabay!).

So, you don't have to go to a bunch of different sites searching for just the right picture. You can type what you want into Google, and they can do all the work for you. It's kind of awesome!