Quite often when it comes to building your website, your focus is on photos of the property you’re trying to rent out. However, if you’ve bought the property mid winter, or are mid refurbishment, sometimes you can find your website looking a bit sparse.
When I’m building a website for a client, I always encourage them to include photos from around the region, as well as more ‘atmospheric’ photos which will add to their overall brand impact. And whereas it usually costs a fortune to source quality images of this type, there is a free source which often gets overlooked.
Flickr is a huge source of free photography, but to be able to exploit it you first need to know a bit about the Creative Commons license. This license (sometimes shown as CC in a circle) is a common standard which individuals can use to specify how you may use their photography. Here is a list of creative commons licenses on Flickr.
A lot of the photography on Flickr you may not use at all, some of the photography is available for sale, but a huge amount of it is licensed under the CC license. To find it, you need to go to Flickr’s advanced search box here and type in a search term (try: field of sunflowers). Then at the bottom of the page just above the submit button , you’ll see the section where you check the box to “ ”. Check all three boxes, as you will be using the image commercially (in the running of your property rental business) and you may be changing it in some way.
Clicking on Search will then return you a huge list of images from which you can pick to put on your website. For example, here is an image of sunflowers available under the CC license (note the license link just below the picture on the left)
The catch?
Most of the time, the CC license specifies that you must attribute the work to the author, and often that you must link back to the Flickr page where you found it. The details of the specific CC license each image is licensed under can be found by clicking on the CC logo on the image page.
In practice this means that you should credit the image owner in the caption of the image, and link to their image page somewhere on your site, either in your website footer, or if you have a blog, why not create a specific sidebar links menu called ‘Photo Credits’ and stick it in there?
Adhering to the license is important both from a legal perspective (so make sure you check it out carefully), and from an ethical perspective, as it encourages photographers to continue to license their work in this way for free. For property rental owners, it means a wealth of beautiful images at your fingertips for free.
Using Flickr photos for free on your website
Quite often when it comes to building your website, your focus is on photos of the property you’re trying to rent out. However, if you’ve bought the property mid winter, or are mid refurbishment, sometimes you can find your website looking a bit sparse.
When I’m building a website for a client, I always encourage them to include photos from around the region, as well as more ‘atmospheric’ photos which will add to their overall brand impact. And whereas it usually costs a fortune to source quality images of this type, there is a free source which often gets overlooked.
Flickr is a huge source of free photography, but to be able to exploit it you first need to know a bit about the Creative Commons license. This license (sometimes shown as CC in a circle) is a common standard which individuals can use to specify how you may use their photography. Here is a list of creative commons licenses on Flickr.
A lot of the photography on Flickr you may not use at all, some of the photography is available for sale, but a huge amount of it is licensed under the CC license. To find it, you need to go to Flickr’s advanced search box here and type in a search term (try: field of sunflowers). Then at the bottom of the page just above the submit button , you’ll see the section where you check the box to “ ”. Check all three boxes, as you will be using the image commercially (in the running of your property rental business) and you may be changing it in some way.
Clicking on Search will then return you a huge list of images from which you can pick to put on your website. For example, here is an image of sunflowers available under the CC license (note the license link just below the picture on the left)
The catch?
Most of the time, the CC license specifies that you must attribute the work to the author, and often that you must link back to the Flickr page where you found it. The details of the specific CC license each image is licensed under can be found by clicking on the CC logo on the image page.
In practice this means that you should credit the image owner in the caption of the image, and link to their image page somewhere on your site, either in your website footer, or if you have a blog, why not create a specific sidebar links menu called ‘Photo Credits’ and stick it in there?
Adhering to the license is important both from a legal perspective (so make sure you check it out carefully), and from an ethical perspective, as it encourages photographers to continue to license their work in this way for free. For property rental owners, it means a wealth of beautiful images at your fingertips for free.
A bientot!
Go on... click it... you know you want to!
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