WordPress and Flickr Photos

by msc-???t?????g? (busy)

Photos can add a lot to a blog post, and I know I am not one of the best examples since many, if not most of my blog posts do not have images with them. There are many places that you can find stock photos for your blog, but it still requires going to that website, searching, downloading, uploading to your blog and inserting into your post. When you have limited time to blog you need to make the most of of your time and that does not always include searching around for images.

There is an alternative to doing all of the searching for stock photos for your blog, use photos from Flickr. Many of the photos on Flickr are licensed under a Creative Commons and you can use them to enhance your blogs posts. There are a number of benefits to using photos from Flickr:

• You have access to great photos from around the world.
• It can save you bandwidth.
• It can reduce the requests on your server.

There are several WordPress Flickr plugins available, but the one plugin I am currently testing is the WordPress Flickr Manager. The plugin allows you to manager your entire Flickr account from inside of your WordPress dashboard, including uploading new photos, inserting your photos into your blog posts and search photos that are available to use via the Creative Commons license.

The one feature I wish the plugin had was a better search for Creative Commons photos. The public photo search returns Creative Commons licensed photos but it would be nice to have an option to limit the search to Creative Commons photos that are allowed under various circumstances. For example photos that are allowed to be used commercially.

If you want to merge your Flickr account and make it easy to add Flickr photos to your WordPress blog take a look at the WordPress Flickr Manager. It might be just the thing you are looking for. Oh, and if you are wondering if this means that I will be adding photos to all of my posts now? I’ll try to add a new one occasionally.