Picture This: Thing 3

I really enjoy this part of my job: the detective work of finding an image that illustrates and augments a Web page or social media post. But it is important to stay on the right side of copyright so the image should be one of several things: in the public domain, licenced to use under Creative Commons, permission to use image is given by copyright holder or the copyright is held by the organisation where I work.


For that reason if I cannot locate a suitable image from our collections, our digital repository or our flickr account, I turn to Pixabay. The quality and variety of images on Pixabay is excellent. Here's one of a tram negotiating one of the vertiginous hills of Lisbon - or at least I think it is. There is no metadata, title, caption to identify the image. How and ever, it brings back memories of holidaying in a wonderful city.

I use pixabay to illustrate library events or blog posts on our website. It's so useful when no accompanying image has been provided and we have nothing that fits the bill in house. For example a blog post announcing our opening (or rather closing) hours over public holidays. Not the most exciting content but add a photo of some cherry blossom for May, a blue sky day shot for June, autumnal leaves for October and suddenly the page doesn't feel quite so dull. And it makes for a more interesting for sharing on social media.

I also use unsplash which has a much smaller pool of photos but I find the images are a really high standard.

I try to avoid using images that I've seen used widely online in an attempt to keep it fresh. Though who am I kidding here! Every social marketer is onto these excellent free image stockpiles.