Eye Candy Rules When It Comes To Facebook and Pinterest

flower Pictures, Images and PhotosRegardless of your gender, you are attracted to great images.  You can’t help yourself. It is the way we are hard-wired.

Eye tracking research has proven that when shown a company directory, users spent 10 percent more time viewing the portrait photos than reading the bios.

We use our eyes to tell us all we need to know.

Which is why social media posts on Facebook and pins on Pinterest give us extra points for having really cool visuals.  Relevant photos and images are also great attention getters in your email newsletters, your website, landing pages, etc.

But coming up with cool photos and images has its challenges.

If you’re not a great photographer, your images are going to be rather ho hum.

Then there are the copyright laws.  People who post their photos to the Internet want to share their visuals, but they don’t want to give up their rights to them.  If it is a really great visual, who can blame them?

This means that to be absolutely safe, one has to search for public domain images, which can be a hassle or they need to purchase an image from one of the many photo stock sites online, which can get expensive.

Here are three great sharing sites that are pretty popular:

Flickr Creative Commons: more than 6 billion images and 51 million registered users; copyright-free images to be used with creative commons license

Stock.XCHNG: nearly 400,000 images; copyright-free

Photobucket: more than 9 billion copyright-free images

But there are more.  In fact, I found a resource where there are over 82 public domain image sites. I certainly didn’t know about many of these and you may not as well.

All you have to do is visit Wikipedia Public Domain Resources page and you’ll have access to great vintage images, photos from NOAA,  US Library of Congress, the National Park Service and other government agencies along with sources for US Cities, Endangered Species and many other photo sharing sites you’ve never heard of and on and on.

Where do you find your copyright free images?