Ever wonder how we manage to have a beautiful image illustrate every one of our posts on this site? Well, the secret is an incredibly handy WordPress plugin called Photo Dropper. It lets you easily search for, and insert into your posts, Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr.
Using the plugin is simple. When you want to insert a photo, you click the Photo Dropper button that is added to the “Upload/Insert” menu at the top of the new entry page in WordPress.
This brings up a search dialog where you can enter in keywords for to search for photos. Type some in and you’ll get back lots of interesting photos and graphics from which to choose. Click on one and it will automatically be inserted into your post.
The beauty of this plugin isn’t just that it makes it easy to find photos, but that it also makes it easy to respect copyright. In the plugin’s preferences you can choose the type of license to which you want search results limited–commercial or noncommercial. That way you know you’ll be using photos legally and ethically. Photo Dropper also takes out all the pain of giving credit to the image’s author because it automatically inserts the correct attribution and link back to Flickr. And as a bonus: Flickr hosts the image, reducing the stress on your server.
Here’s a bonus tip for those of using the Thesis WordPress theme: follow these instructions to edit your custom.css file so that when you use Photo Dropper, the images are nicely formatted and aligned left or right as you see fit.
