Notes about images

'work in progress'

Why Litter

Naming Images

Develop a file-naming protocol that works for you, your audience, and the search engines. A descriptive file name helps the search engines know what your image is about. Even if you have some sort of numeric coding you use for internal identification, include a description of the image and keywords in the file name.

There are different definitions of legal images.

Royalty free: Royalty free images aren’t free as the name suggests. With a royalty-free image, you can usually use it as you choose, but you are not allowed to edit or resell it.

Rights Managed: Normally with these images, you purchase a single-user license for the particular image in question. You have to decide, before you use it, just how you plan to use it. For example, if you use one of these images in your blog post, you can’t then use the same image in a video. You would need to purchase an additional license.

Public domain: Public domain images have no restrictions. You don’t need to ask for any permission before using these images. Although it’s the general consensus you provide attribution, it’s by no means mandatory.

Creative Commons: Images have been granted access by the creator. But in most cases, you will need to provide attribution to the creator.

https://neilpatel.com/blog/blog-post-image-guide/

Create a Great User Experience

(From: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-images)

To boost your content’s visibility in Google Images, focus on the user by providing a great user experience: make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Here are some tips:
Provide good context: Make sure that your visual content is relevant to the topic of the page. We suggest that you display images only where they add original value to the page. We particularly discourage pages where neither the images or the text are original content.
Optimize placement: Whenever possible, place images near relevant text. When it makes sense, consider placing the most important image near the top of the page.
Don’t embed important text inside images: Avoid embedding text in images, especially important text elements like page headings and menu items, because not all users can access them (and page translation tools won’t work on images). To ensure maximum accessibility of your content, keep text in HTML, provide alt text for images.
Create informative and high quality sites: Good content on your webpage is just as important as visual content for Google Images – it provides context and makes the result more actionable. Page content may be used to generate a text snippet for the image, and Google considers the page content quality when ranking images.
Create device-friendly sites: Users search on Google Images more from mobile than on desktop. For this reason, it is important that you design your site for all device types and sizes. Use the mobile friendly testing tool to test how well your pages work on mobile devices, and get feedback on what needs to be fixed.
Create good URL structure for your images: Google uses the URL path as well as the file name to help it understand your images. Consider organizing your image content so that URLs are constructed logically.

Your Image file names should include:

An external file identifier (typically a keyword or keyword phrase, or part of the text in the image) so search engines and humans can quickly identify the content of the image without seeing it.
Your organisation name (or an individual’s name) so search engines and your human readers can connect the image to you
Your internal file identifier (alpha and/or numeric)

Separate your words with hyphens, not spaces or underscores.

Stock Photo Websites for Blog Images

WiX have free images accessible via the Media folder. There are lots of different sources you can tap into for stock photos online:

(From: https://www.ryrob.com/blog-images/)

"Some of the best ones to try are:

Unsplash (free): This stock image site is royalty-free and has one of the most extensive libraries of beautiful photos, graphics and images on the Internet.
Freepik (free and paid): This site offers free and premium (paid) options for thousands of vectors, photos, psd and icon graphics. The free graphics are always no-strings-attached for personal use, but for commercial use they require attribution.
iStockPhoto (paid): You pay for images using credits or through a subscription pack. (You can also buy stock video clips and music.) You’ll find a range of images to choose from, including photos, vector illustrations, cartoons, icons, and more.
Shutterstock (paid): This site is similar to iStockPhoto, with a very large range of images, plus video clips and music that you can use.
Pixabay (free): All the content on Pixabay (photos, vectors, video clips, music, and more) is free to use. You won’t get the same quality or range as on iStockPhoto or Shutterstock, but for many newer bloggers, Pixabay can provide all the images they need.
Pexels (free): Like Pixabay, Pexels offers copyright-free images and videos that you can use on your blog. It’s well worth searching both sites to find the perfect photos or other images for your posts."

https://openverse.org/ "An extensive library of free stock photos, images, and audio, available for free use."

Also,
(from https://yoast.com/using-images-in-your-blog-post/)

"Foter.com:

Another website is Foter, which claims there are over 335 million free stock photos on its site. You can explore by category or simply conduct a search. Each and every photo will display the license under which it’s listed. Some photos require credit to the photographer, some photos may not be altered and some may not be modified. This can make it a bit harder to find a suitable picture here, especially because you have to make sure you comply with the right license.

f(rom https://yoast.com/using-images-in-your-blog-post/):