A picture says 1000 words. Or so they say. But whether you believe the clichés or not, there’s no denying the fact that images make a blog post (particularly a long one like this) look friendlier, easier to read and are just generally pleasant on the eye.

But let’s assume that you:-

• Don’t want to/have the time or equipment to take photos to match every single blog post.

• Don’t want to get into trouble for reusing images you don’t have the right permission to use.

• Don’t want to spend a lot of money acquiring images to use.

How do you get free images for your blog?

There are a host different ways you can acquire free images for your blog. Let’s have a look at seven of them…

Google Images – Filtered by License

Let’s start with the most obvious one. Google Images is fantastic. Most of you will have come across it before and many of you will have used it. What is less known though is that you can search images by license, so can filter results in order that you only see the ones you have permission to reuse on your blog.

The biggest advantage here is the sheer quantity of images available and the fact that you can search them by theme. However, the chances are that you’ve probably seen a lot of them before, thus they’re not particularly unique or original.

Graphs

Granted, graphs aren’t pictures in the traditional sense and I’m pretty sure that neither Monet, Picasso nor Van Gogh specialised in the art of pretty line graphs. But they do add a visual dimension to a blog post. Create them in Excel and save as images or even use a graph generator such as this one.

Particularly when you’re posting an informative post with a lot of numbers to crunch, graphs are great.

Did I really just say ‘graphs are great?’ My old school Maths teacher used to say that as I sniggered.

Wordle

If you can’t think of a particular image that works with your post but you just want one to break up the text, then try Wordle. This great tool lets you create ‘word images,’ either from a URL or from a chunk of text you paste in. Either ‘randomise,’ or play specifically with layout, fonts and background. As an example of what you can come up with, I just pasted all the text of this post in and generated the following image on a ‘randomise.’

Strip Generator

Everyone loves a comic strip and they’re great in almost any sort of light hearted blog post. Strip Generator lets you generate your own comic strip quickly and easily – much like the one above I just generated.

This is definitely one of my personal favourite ways to generate free images for blogs.

OpenClipArt

Ever since there was Microsoft Office I have had a bit of a soft spot for clip art. OpenClipArt is a resource for finding (and sharing any you create yourself) free-to-use clip art.

Here’s one such fine example.

The Newspaper Clipping Generator

I love this Newspaper Clipping Generator.

You could of course argue that an image with quite so many words on it isn’t really an image at all. But I argue again that this does offer a visual depth to a blog post… and can be used as a bit of fun if nothing else!

There are other generators on that site too, including a cigarette packet generator and clapper board generator.

Redkid Image Generators

At Redkid Image Generators there is a lot of choice! There are dozens of different generators to choose from… my personal probably being the London Underground one below.

To name but a few there’s a Paris Metro sign, iPad, Blackberry, a billboard and a car bumper sticker.

Any I’ve Missed?

These are just 7 of my favourite but I’m sure there’s loads I’ve missed. Feel free to share other ways of getting free images for blogs in the comments