The world of blogging can open the door to wonderful opportunities and can create real and lasting friendships. Bloggers make up a society of sorts. Like any society, bloggers have “classes”, with some doing it for a hobby, some as a business and a ton in between. The world of blogging also has a lot of unspoken rules, aside from the spoken ones provided by the FTC. In this Blogger Etiquette Series, we’ll learn many of the unspoken rules of blogging and how to NOT break those rules.

Today’s topic is using photos from others. There are many factors to consider when using someone else’s photo online. First up, the best idea is to use your own photos. Sometimes that is not possible. Often, I compose and publish blog posts away from home and am not able to take my own pertinent photo. (See this post for an example, where somehow I didn’t have a pen/pencil and paper.) What I did do, is the next best thing. I used a public domain photo. Public domain photos are copyright free, although some sites with public domain photos ask for a link back to support their service of rounding up all of the photos. For a huge list of many public domain photo sources, visit this page. Also, any photo found on a government (.gov) site is public domain and can be used with no credit necessary. For example, the image used in this post was from a governmental police website.

Ok, so now that we’ve got the ideal ways of using photos out of the way, let’s talk about the less than ideal ways to use photos on your blog. Did you see a photo on someone else’s blog that you just have to use on your own blog? If it’s from another blog, the best thing you can do is ask the blogger to use it, and then provide a link back to their site once you do.

Are you doing a roundup post of your favorite things that you saw on Pinterest? You should include a link to the source of every image you use on your own site. It doesn’t have to be huge, but it has to be there.

One of the worst things that you can ever do with regard to using someone else’s image is to “hotlink” it. This is the act of literally copying the image as is via highlighting it and then pasting it into a blog post of your own. What that does, is it keeps the link and photo source the same, so it’s like it is still on the original person’s website. This is bad in several ways. 90% of hotlinking is not accompanied by a link back or credit of any sort. Every time an image is loaded on a website, bandwidth is used to make that image show up. The bandwidth comes from whereever that image is hosted. So if you hotlinked a photo, you are using someone else’s bandwidth to load that picture. Many hosting plans have bandwidth limits (not Blogger blogs) , so in addition to being lazy and rude, you could actually be costing another Blogger money! If a Blogger finds out their images are being hotlinked, there are a number of things that can be done. See this post for how to handle that.

Now here’s that part that can get really, really bad for the hotlinker… and really really fun for the hotlinkee. When an image is hotlinked, the image source address stays the same. If you hotlink someone’s image who is technologically savvy, they can actually change that image to whatever they want by keeping changing the image on their end. See what happened here:

Here, the owner of Frugal Finders was slightly merciful in the image he replaced. He simply decided to notify the other site’s readers that they steal images. Think about it, with a little knowledge, ANY image, again that is ANY image, can be put in the place of the one you hotlinked by the owner of that image. I know of several bloggers who have gotten so fed up with the same person hotlinking them that they put huge, expletive filled images up and images telling their readers that they hate them. Simply put, DON’T HOTLINK!!

If you must must must use someone else’s image and cannot get a hold of them for permission, take a screenshot of the image, upload it to your own site’s server and link back to the source with a “thank you” attached. Bloggers love getting links back and will probably be happy about it. If you get an email requesting that you take the image down, kindly oblige and all should be well.

So there you go. Some blogging etiquette when it comes to using photos from others.

For the legalities of blogging and content, check out the following resources:
Creative Commons
Blogger Copyright Policy
WordPress Terms of Service