A faster way to embed free images from Wikimedia Commons with Copyright Attribution
Let me just start with a video to show you how the tool works.
Do you ever find yourself looking for free images that you can use in your website or social media? I do.
I don’t always need anything unique and can settle for images that can be used with or without attribution to the author. There are many services that offer free images, such as, Unsplash, or Pexels.
However these services often contain only beautiful images that are nice for visuals, but often lack specific details that I want to show in my post. For example, a specific part of the car engine, or a specific type of flower. For such images I like to use Wikimedia Commons, it contains millions of community supplied images. Most of them have Creative Commons licence, meaning they are free to use for any purpose as long as you attribute the author.
In order to speed up the process of embedding an image I created a tool that allows to get the image with a caption that includes the author and link to the original. This way, I can just search, copy and paste and the copyright is already satisfied.
How to use Wikimedia Commons to embed free images?
Step 1: Open the tool
Go to our websites Wikimedia Commons tool. You will see a search bar that will be your main tool.
Step 2: Enter a keyword and hit Go
In the search box write what you are searching for. Hit Go, or press Enter.
20 images will load initially. If you keep scrolling it will load additional 20, until there are no more to show.
Step 3: Select an image
Step 4: Click Copy Code
This will copy the html to your clipboard and you can then paste it into your website editor with filled in alt tag and caption containing attribution to the author. Here is the image from the example above:
Search for images faster with Context Menu Search.
Additionally, to skip the step first 2 steps of going to the tool page and searching for the keyword you can make it even faster by combining this with a Chrome extension Context Menu Search.
With this tool you can use the right-click menu to search for selected text in different search engines.
To configure the Context Menu Search follow these steps:
Add the extension
Add the Context Menu Search Chrome ExtensionChrome Extension from the Extension Store.
Configure the extension
The first 3 are there by default, but you need to add the 4th option. In the configuration you need to add:
- Display label: Commons (actually this can be anything you want)
- Link: https://agilemerchants.com/wikimedia-commons?search=TESTSEARCH
When configured like this, the TESTSEARCH will be replaced with the selected term that you right click on.
Using this tool, you can easily find free images faster, and search directly from the context of what you are writing.
Happy writing!
