The suggestion for blog posts is to use pictures...so where do you get pics? Read on!

It has been suggested to me personally, and I have read this advice consistently here on Steemit, to use pics in your posts to gain more reader attention. So where do you get pictures to use? Here are a few suggestions:

• Take your own. You probably already have a stock of pictures from throughout your life to illustrate stories you post, but what else do you have in your albums? Remember that a picture says a 1000 words? Look at your pics and see what other alternate uses you have for them.

For example, I used this pic to illustrate that I was stationed at Mt. Fuji in a post I made about some funny things that happened during my service
https://steemit.com/stories/@stevescoins/some-funny-stories-from-the-marine-corp

What else could I have used the pic for?
A description of the role of the LAV-25 in Marine Corps combat doctrine
A story about Mt. Fuji and it's place in Japanese culture
A tutorial about framing subjects when taking pics
A sob story about actually having youth and vitality in my youth /snort!

Each picture can be used for many different stories!

There are plenty of tutorials on Steemit about hosting your pics and uploading them, and using Markdown to position them on your post. If you can't find any, let me know and I'll dig up my links for you. Also feel free to post your own tutorials here on this post.

One image hosting site is here. I don't use an account for this one, I just upload my pic...and if I'm smart I bookmark the page for later use!

• The use of Creative Commons

Creative Commons helps you legally share your knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world — unlocking the full potential of the internet to drive a new era of development, growth and productivity.

Creative Commons goes far beyond pictures in providing material for you to share and re-invent, but we are talking about pictures in this post, so let's FIND some pictures to use with Creative Commons permissions.

Wikimedia Commons has an index of categories of pictures that you can use to illustrate your post.

I could use the following pic if I wanted to continue to yap about the LAV-25

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
Author User:Bukvoed
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Bukvoed

Notice that I give Bukvoed credit for his work, a link to where I found the work, and that I used Creative Commons. I don't always do that, but I should, and you should too when you use someone else's stuff.

Other sites in which SOME users offer Creative Commons licensing are:
Flickr
Photobucket

• Other sources - Publicly available photos created by the government (in other words, paid for by the taxpayer) can be found in the public domain, along with work that has been copyright expired.

Some things to consider. Make sure that you have the right to use the pic you are using. I know that we don't do that for the most part, and that we aren't usually costing the the creator money, and that we usually don't get punished or sued for doing it. But it is polite!

Suggested reading:
http://lifehacker.com/5992419/the-best-ways-to-be-sure-youre-legally-using-online-photos
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/copyright-fair-use-and-how-it-works-for-online-images/