One of the problems one has when they run a site like mine, beyond the obvious one of having to come up with a new article topic almost every day, is trying to find photos and graphics that are allowed to be used. We all know that we are not allowed to use copyrighted material, because it belongs to someone else. There is an exception to this and that is if the copyright holder gives you permission to use his or her work. If you look around this site you will find a few instances of this type of thing, where a copyright holder graciously allowed me to use their photos. If you intend to use copyrighted photos let me warn you, when you write to the copyright holders only about one third usually answer and about half of them say no. Another source for photos is you. With today's digital cameras you can get instant photos of objects and people that you can post. Be warned that the copyright law now states that just because there is no copyright notice on a work, doesn't mean that it isn't copyrighted. The work is automatically copyrighted when created and posted whether there is a copyright notice or not.

When I first realized that I would need a source of photos for my articles, I began to accumulate commercial cds and dvds that contained photos that I was allowed to use. These collections of photos are available in almost all stores that sell computer software. You can also get them by buying them online. I got to the point where I must have at least a couple of million photos. Here is the ironic part, I hardly ever use them because it is too much trouble to sort through them to try and find the photograph that I need. If you are going to try and build a library of photos that you can use on a website or in a publication, the best way to store them is to create a folder that is broken down with sub-folders that contain the subject matter of the photos with folders inside them showing who to credit the photo to when you post it. Here is an example of what I am talking about. When I set up my photo library here is what I did. I created a folder named Animals. Inside that folder were sub-folders with the name of each animal. Inside those folders were folders for each different source, so things looked like this: Animals -> Cat -> MyPhotos -> All the cat photos that I have taken. When I want to reach a particular photo it is much easier for me to find it.

How does one locate photos that can be legally used by anyone, by getting them off of other sites? I guess this is one of the toughest questions to answer for some people, but I have found a number of places that allow you to reuse their photos without permission. I know that you will think that I am partial here, but a good way to find some places that allow you to do this, is by going to my site, About Facts Net and clicking on the Comprehensive Internet Search button on the main screen. When the search screen comes up, click on Image. When the image screen comes up, select Fagan Finder Images. You will now be presented with one of the best choice screens for images around. I have tried many places to find images, but I find this the best.

Stock.xching is a very good place to find images and they are free as long as you don't use the premium ones at the bottom of each screen. These are photographs that are taken by people, so don't expect to see historical events and such. Some examples of photos that I have gotten from this site, that I have used in the past, are photos of cars, houses, hospitals and doctors, just to mention a few. MorgueFile is another great place to find photos that are free. The search link from Fagan Finder to MorgueFile doesn't work ,so just click on the MorgueFile entry below it to go there. The assortment of photos is not as grand as the one on Stock.xching, but it is still quite useful. These two sites account for quite a few photos on my site.

NASA is a very good place to get photos from. They are usually all in the public domain, but be careful, some aren't and these will usually contain a notice of who took them or a copyright notice. You can not only get photos, you can also get videos and audio files that can be used there. There are many government sites that contain usable photos like the US Fish and Wildlife Service or the US Park Service, just to mention a couple, but remember the warning I gave you about a small percentage of the photos being copyrighted still stands, so be careful before you post any of their photos. A trickier source for photos is the Library of Congress. Just the opposite is true for them, most of their material is copyrighted. Some of the old stuff they have has had the copyright expire and can be used, if the copyright wasn't reinstated. It is up to you to read the copyright law to find how old the material has to be before you can use it and if it has been copyrighted again. A handy government search engine exists named USA.gov. This is the government portal and even has a government image search. This is a great way to find photos of elusive things like a nuclear reactor for example.

Image From MorgueFile

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia has many photos and graphics that fall into the Public Domain, Gnu Free Documentation and Creative Commons categories. All of these types of photos and graphics can be used, but there are different restrictions for each. Public Domain is completely free to use anyway you want. The GNU Free Documentation License means that you assure that anyone can copy it and redistribute it. A photo or graphic under Creative Commons may have many different restrictions and you have to read them to see if you still want to download that particular photo or graphic for use. To find more of these types of photos you can do a photo search in Google by saying for example, Creative Commons and searching,. or Public Domain.

There are some photograph search engines out there, but most of them do not differentiate between whether the photos are copyrighted or not and I find these search engines a waste of time for finding photos. Lastly, if you want to spend money, you can use a commercial service that may have millions of photos available for a price per photo, or a monthly or yearly fee. One such service is Clipart.com. Currently they charge $129.95 per year or $14.95 per week. I used them for awhile, when I received a free subscription with an image disk I had purchased, but since my site generates no revenue, I just couldn't afford it on top of paying to have the site hosted. They have a lot of photos and graphics.

The final word for people that need graphics is that there are really a lot of sources out there that are free, if you take the time to find them and to find out what you can use and what you can't.