Enterprise Nation

If you're a home based designer, whether you maintain your own home business website, keep a blog or make your own promotional materials, you'll know that finding images to use can be time consuming, expensive and sometimes even illegal. Use Flickr to find free images that are safe to use in your home business. Here's how.

A paid service, with an all-you-can-eat pricing plan, like Photos.com, is perhaps an easier way to find royalty free images and photos for your website or promotional materials, if it's something you do quite often. iStockphoto, with its pay-as-you-go simplicity is better still, for the more occasional user. But the easiest by far is good ol' Google Image Search. My image search engine of choice when I'm looking for photos of Hollyoaks cast members, for example, but I wouldn't use it for my home business or for my clients. And I'll tell you why...

Photographs are copyrighted the moment they are taken. This means it's not enough to use a photo on your own website or promotional materials that seems OK. You're probably breaking the law! The best thing to do, bar the options above, is to find images with explicit licenses that give you the rights to use them. Creative Commons is the most popular of this kind of licensing. With it any kind of work - text, images, videos, etc. - can be marked full copyright (all rights reserved), in the public domain (no rights reserved) or okay for certain uses (some rights reserved).

And you can find these kind of licensed images on Flickr, using its advanced search page. Here you can filter search results by Creative Commons-licensed images, and further limit that to those you can use commercially, if that's what you want. New site, compfight manages to search for CC-licensed Flickr photos better than Flickr does, so you should definitely give that a go.

And remember to give credit where credit is due! – San Sharma

Photo credit: Flickr user kk+.

San Sharma is a creative thinker, blogger and designer, as well as a writer on popular culture, technology and business.

• www.sansharma.com