Have you tried Pexels yet? Free Creative Commons 0 Photography, perfect for bloggers.

Just thought I'd take a minute to share something I found on the old interwebs recently.

Ever find yourself writing a blog post, but don't have the right graphic for it?

Now you could just go with an all text post, but blog posts with pictures get 78% more views, according to a statistic I just made up.

You could also go with the norm, do a quick google search and then find whatever picture you like, maybe link back to the original website (maybe not).  (and let's be honest, we're all guilty of this copyright infringing method at least some of the time)

Or you could go with stock photography.

Stock photography, however, is not cheap!

Shutter stock images start at $29 for 2 images.

iStock (by getty images) runs at 3 for $36.

And Adobe's new Stock photos are $9.99 a pop.

Of course all of these services and more offer discounts the more images you buy, or monthly and annual pricing plans. But for the hobby blogger, well these just aren't reasonable are they.

And yeah, you can take your own pictures, and usually I do. But sometimes you just want a great image that captures the feel of your post. And you don't want to have to pay anyone for it.

Enter Pexels (it's like pixels get it!)

So I stumbled across Pexels from either a blog post about it, or twitter, a few weeks back, and thought, neat. What they are is a one stop shop for high quality stock photography.  They have over 3800 photos, and about 70 get added monthly, so probably enough to handle your regular blogging needs.

And best of all, it's all free!!!

And not just a little bit free either, all of the photos are licensed under what is called the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. Which means they are completely free, even for commercial use. And you don't have to include any attribution, or link back.

Plus you're free to edit and change the pictures however you want.

Like putting this valley village in a whole new setting.

Or moving my brother and I from the mountains to Egypt! (traditional cheesy photoshop for the win).

Alright, clearly I've got too much time one my hands (or am just procrastinating hard on paper writing tonight), but seriously check Pexels out. They didn't pay me to tell you that, but I wish they had. Oh well, I'll settle for some awesome stock photos.

PS... I'm thinking Mark and I are a little over dressed for Egypt... guess I've still got a lot to learn about photoshop!  lols