Good blog posts need an image to get read, but you can’t pull images off of Google image search, the main Flickr site, or anywhere else that doesn’t explicitly allow us to use their images without violating someone’s copyright. They just don’t belong to you.
Copyright is important because if you use someone else’s work on your commercial product, you can be sued and you would lose. You need to use images that have an open-use license, meaning that we’re allowed to use them without permission from the author.
Here are some great places that I use for images:
- http://commons.wikimedia.org Pretty much everything on this site is open source and OK to use.
- http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ Stick with the “Attribution License” section only. Images from this section can be used without permission from the author as long as we put their name on the picture in our application.