TUTORIAL: GUIDE TO FINDING COPYRIGHT-FREE IMAGES & PROPERLY CITING YOUR SOURCES

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Greetings everyone,

When it comes to the field of article writing and blogging, it is very important to give credit to any third party or guide you may incorporate in your work. Otherwise the work is said to be plagiarized which is a punishable offense by the law.

Also without images, it is very difficult to present a clear picture of the idea we are presenting. This is why we usually like to incorporate images our own pictures or pictures from other sources into our posts. However, we must be mindful of our image sources and not use copyrighted images. The type of image we are allowed to use are the copyright-free ones.

CONCEPT OF COPYRIGHT-FREE IMAGES

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Copyright-free images are the various images which the original authors or producers have waived the rights to their ownership. This means that, we are free to use and manipulate these images as we see fit. However, in using such images, it is compulsory to cite your sources and credit the original author of the work. Otherwise, you have plagiarized their work.

Other than copyright free or authentic images of your own authorship, you cannot use any other image in your posts here on steemit. That is referred to as content abuse which is not tolerated anywhere on the steemit ecosystem.

In our steemit communities, we deal with these offenses by either muting the posts of the individual or banning them outright from our community.

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CITES TO USE TO LOCATE COPYRIGHT-FREE IMAGES

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There are several sites which have been created for the purposes of finding these copyright-free images. This means that any image that has been put on these sites are under licenses which makes them free to use.

Such sites can be seen as follows;

• pexels
• pixabay
• unsplash
• life of pix
• free range
• splitshire

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Once you have been able to successfully visit one these sites and obtaining a desirable image, the next thing is to properly cite your source and credit the author of the image.

CITING YOUR SOURCES

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In citing your image sources, there is an important markdown you must incorporate in order to enhance the presentation of your work. This is done as follows; [source](put the link of your image here)

Your cited source then appears like this : source

However, you should always your sources for a better presentation. This is done using the markdown below.

<center>[source](put the link of your image here)</center>

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Your cited source then appears as follow;

source

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A practical example of an image from Pexels can be seen below.

_{Locating The Image Link to Insert In Your Source Citation}

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Once you insert it properly, you should have something like the example below.

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source

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For images from sites like pexels and pixabay, no attribution is required as clearly stated under the license below. So you should be good to go with just the sources cited.

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_{No attribution is required here}

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Note: where attribution is required, you must indicate a brief statement spelling out the image's original owner and what it contains.

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Thank you for your attention.