If you are anything like me,  finding free quality images for your blog posts is a real pain.  Enter Compfight an image search engine for Flickr.

What Is Compfight?

It is an image search engine that allows you to find images from the Flickr photo sharing service against a keyword that matches your content.

That is Compfight.com. there is also a WordPress plugin for Compfight which allows you to do all of this inside of WordPress and to give the correct attribution to the person that created the image.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/compfight/

Licensing

All of the images are licensed under the creative commons license, so they are free to use as long as you give an attribution link back to the original creator of the image.

There is a standard creative commons and a commercial license, since this is a business site I opted for the commercial license, this means the images are still free, but I have fewer images to choose from.

Settings

There are a series of settings you can make on the plugins to control which images are returned.  This is done from settings -> compfight.

You can set the license as discussed above, set safe search so adult content is never returned, and lastly the most useful function is to set image sizes you want.  I use a standard image size for all my posts of 240 x 180 pixels, setting this as my preference ensures I am only shown images that fit in my theme correctly.

Getting Images

There is a new camera icon in the insert tool bar, click on that and you are granted access to a search panel.

Type your desired keyword in that panel and your search results are presented.  The algorithm may need some work, but it is far better than the existing search function that comes with Flickr.  If you have ever used that, you will know the search results are very random.

Review the images retrieved for you, click on the one you like, with the size you like and it is automatically inserted into your post or page.  An automatic attribution link will also be added so you comply with the appropriate licensing.

Major Downside

One major flaw of the plugin, in my opinion, is that you cannot add an image to the featured image section of a post, only insert it into the body.

The way my theme works is to take the featured image and show it next to a post and on the blog home page.

As a result downloading files from compfight.com instead of using the plugin is far more effective for me.

Wrap Up

If you struggle to find high quality images to go with your high quality posts then this is a brilliant service or plugin for you .

Image via Compfight by davehogg