I would never argue that a picture can out-paint a thousand well-chosen words, but they can add a lot to your posts. The internet is full of useable pictures, the simplest way to acquire one is to right-click on it and select “save picture as” from the pull-down menu. You can then upload it to your blog by using the square icon on the Add New Post page (just to the right of Upload/Insert). It’s pretty easy, but here’s an online tutorial, just in case.
But just because you can upload a picture doesn’t mean that you should. You must consider that somebody, somewhere has the rights to that picture. They may or may not want you to simply “borrow” their image and re-post it on your blog. Here’s the Guardian’s Technology editor, Charles Arthur, on why taking some else’s pictures is so annoying.
The easiest way to overcome this problem is to do one of four things:
1). Take your own pictures wherever possible;
2). Use only Copyleft images (why not click on this link if the term is new to you?)
3). Subscribe to a service like Flickr– and use images that have been cleared for blog use (just like the one I’ve used to the above-right)
4). If you must use somelse’s image – then make sure that you create a link back to the source and credit the image in either a picture caption and/or your text.
It’s not a case of common courtesty – treating images make the web easier to use for all of us. And helps search engines like Google organise the web.
City Bloggers 09 