Get Free News Images from PicApp

Last week I discussed Photo Dropper, a powerful WordPress plugin that lets you search Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr and embed them directly into your posts, complete with correct attribution.

But while Photo Dropper is great for a general image search where the photo doesn’t have to be timely, blogs covering news, celebrity gossip, etc. will be hard pressed to find anything of use in Flickr. Flickr tends to favor creative and personal photos, not news-related images.

If you run a blog that covers current events but don’t have your own photography staff and can’t afford to license for your posts, PicaApp may be able to help. Through its partnership with various stock photo agencies, it millions of photos available for you to freely embed into your blog and they even have a simple WordPress plugin to make the process go more quickly.

PicApp is simply the easiest way to get free, legal professional-quality images into your blog.

Using PicApp

Whether you use the WordPress plugin or the PicApp site itself, the steps you follow are essentially the same. The only difference is that, when using the plugin, you’ll find the PicApp interface on the “Write” panel of your admin area. (Note: The screenshots below are from the plugin, the process on the site may look slightly different)

First, you search for a keyword related to the photo that you want to embed in your site. PicApp will return a series of search results.

Click on the photo that you want to see it larger. You will then be given a series of options including a choice of sizes, the ability to set the image alignment and to determine whether it text wraps around the image.

Then you either embed the image into your entry directly or copy it to your clipboard and paste in the HTML code. The end result looks something like this:

At that point, you’re done and you can either upload the post or, if you wish, add more images.

Drawbacks

The biggest drawback to PicApp, especially when compared to Photo Dropper, is that PicApp does not embed the image as a jpg or png file, but as a JavaScript. PicApp wraps a (weak) DRM scheme around the image that restricts right clicks.

As part of this JavaScript insertion, advertising is added to the image. This advertising is for the benefit of PicApp and, at this time, users do not share revenue. It also includes an overlay on top of the image that includes attribution and information about the image itself.

This makes it impossible for the image to be included in Google search results, this is likely by design, and also may affect the way it is displayed in feed readers.

Still, for some sites, the benefits will clearly outweigh any drawbacks and using PicApp may be a deal that is simply too good to pass up.

Conclusions

In the end, whether you use PicApp or not will depend on the kind of site you run and if it is a good fit. If you get a lot of your readership via RSS, have ad arrangements that may not tolerate PicApp’s ads or a theme that will not tolerate the extra items, it might not work well.

If PicApp isn’t a good deal, as Amanda Fazani covered in November, there are many other services that can help.

But for sites that cover timely topics and need images that only major stock photo agencies can provide, it is a potential win-win situation. A supply of millions of images available for free insertion with only a few caveats is a pretty good deal.

Video

Here is a short video PicApp made for their WordPress plugin.

PicApp WordPress Plugin from PicappAccount on Vimeo.

Written by Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today
Posted on January 29th, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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