Andy Rankin

I think everyone probably agrees that including a cute or relevant photo or image with your boring blog post makes it less boring. There are tons and tons of images available from Flickr and many that even give people the right to use the images (sometimes with certain conditions). So it seems like a natural fit to include an image in most blog posts.

It’s kind of a pain though. It’s not too hard, once you know how (start at this page), to track down cool images with appropriate permissions. Just today I also noticed a Share This link which gives you the option Embed it which seems to include some attribution to the image (one of the normal requirements for using it). I’m not sure what exactly qualifies as appropriate or enough attribution - I should look into that. Anyway, this Embed it option gets me pretty close - but in this case the image size that it gave me the code for wasn’t what I wanted. I had to manually track down the smaller version of the image and update the HTML code that I got from the Embed it feature. Not a huge deal but still a bit annoying.

I’d love a WordPress plugin that would let me punch in some search terms and then it would go out and search for images with the appropriate permissions. It would then let me pick the one I want, and the size I want, and it would stick it in the blog post with the correct permissions. Now that would be cool. Actually, maybe something like that already exists? I haven’t even looked.