Images help capture visitor attention, generate more organic visibility, and drive leads for your WordPress site. While most site owners prefer creating their own visual content, others borrow images from other sites to save time.
In fact, you can’t just download and add others’ images to your blog. Since these images are protected by copyright laws, you’re not allowed to use them without the owner’s permission.
You must add the source, creator, or photographer to any borrowed images displayed on your site. These are called image credit.
To better understanding what image credit is and how to add it to your site, keep reading this post. We also wrap this article with some bonus tips when adding image credit to your site.
Let’s jump in.
What is an Image Credit?
Image credit mentions who the image you’re using on your site should originally belong to. You can place the image credit in different positions, next to your image, under your image as the caption, at the footer of your site, or even on any page and post.
There are many ways for you to show the image credit, including:
- Photo by Photographer Name
- Drawings provided by Illustrator Name
- Image courtesy of Where you go theme
- © 2021 Image Source
- © Image name 2020
- “Image name” by Photographer Name is licensed under CC-BY 2.0
Why Adding Image Credit
As we mentioned above, there are copyright laws written to protect all images on the Internet. If you use any of others’ photos, you have to give proper attribution to the original. It’ll help illustrate where or who the images exactly belong to.
When providing image credits, you’re also protecting yourself from legal issues. Besides, the image copyright shows that you respect other people’s work and creativity.
Unless you provide the source of images, it causes serious problems that not only cost you money but also destroy your site and your business reputation.
The owners can require your hosting to remove their images from your site. At the same time, they can make a DMCA complaint against your site to Google. Since then, Google will give you a penalty and immediately delete those illegally used images from search results.
How to Find and Add Image Credits
As a matter of fact, most images available on the Internet don’t have licensing information. This means that you’re not permitted to reuse them by all means.
Some others, on the other hand, let you re-up their images on their site on the condition that you have to include the attribution or image credit. This information can be easily found on the image download page.
Once downloading the image and copying the credit, follow this guide to add it to your site:
Firstly, you can open or create a new page/post on your WordPress site from the backend.
If you’re using a WordPress page builder on your site, simply hit the plus button and add an Image block to the page content.
After that, you need to upload your desired image into the block. Under that image, you’ll see a line saying “Write caption”. You now paste the image credit previously copied from the download page such as image name and owner name.
In some cases, it requires you to link to the image’s original source as well. To do so, you just need to click on the insert link button and enter the link to the web page or the original file.
That’s it!
Tips When Adding Image Credit
#1 Use Images from Free Stock Photos
Although the process of providing image credit is not complicated at all, many businesses owners try not to reuse copyrighted photos to avoid unwanted problems. You may not know when the hosting provider or Google will remove these images from your sites or search results.
To keep away from this scenario, we recommend using images from free stock photo sites. Unsplash, Pixabay, Public Domain Archive, Pixels, and Picjumbo, just to name a few.
- Unsplash – A huge collection of beautiful images for you to download freely. You can find photos of any subject by entering a keyword in the search box. It’ll then show up a list of hundreds of related photos and images.
- Pixabay – A stock of over 2.4 million high-quality media files, including photos, images, videos. When you search for an image of a specific subject there, the platform will also recommend you some Shutterstock photos with a watermark. You need to pay money to download the original file..
- Public Domain Archive – A collection of images and photographs organized by topics like Modern Images, Weekly Images, and Vintage Images.
- Pixel – A website providing high quality and 100% free images and videos of any subject and topic. You can sign up, log in, and upload your own images there.
The thing is that since these images are freely available on the Internet, there are a lot of people using them on their websites. This can affect the user experience as they don’t see what differentiates yours from others.
Still, the challenge lies in finding the right and specific image for your blog or website. Like what Pixabay is doing, it recommends topic-focused images along with free general ones. Unless you pay some money, you have to use just acceptable photos.
#2 Try to Use Your Original Images
Instead of reusing others’ images and having to include their attribution and image credit, you can design your own simple ones. There are a lot of free tools for you to design images without any expert designing skills.
- Canva – Born for beginners, Canva simplifies the designing process by giving templates. You can make an infographic, social media post, banner, or even a presentation with ease.
- Piktochart – This easy-to-use web-based infographic application helps you make impressive presentations, banners, charts, and graphics. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to do all these things.
- Pablo – The tool allows you to design beautiful graphics for social media and blogs. Increasing your social media engagement is now just an easy game.
Never Forget to Add Image Credit in WordPress
Image credit says who or where each image belongs to. If you use an image not created by yourself, you must provide the original source and its attribution. This information is often found on the image download page.
You can add the image credit to an image easily via the caption feature in every image block. It’s possible for you to include a link to the source too.
If you don’t want to use image credit, consider using photos from free stocks or design your own ones using simple designing tools for beginners.
Still have a question about how to add image credit? Leave a comment below to let us know.
