Photobucket
A long-standing member, Margarita, put me onto Photobucket (my 13 year old daughter knew all about it too, apparently
)
Photobucket is a site that allows people to upload and share content, such as images and drawings.
Warning: Photobucket makes it's money through advertising and not all ads are entirely wholesome and uplifting. Also, not all the images are tasteful. If you are feeling in anyway fragile, I would not recommend using this site. I would instead try and find some clipart from old posts on TP and use that.
It's terms and conditions are such that it assumes that users will only upload content which they have the copyright to or which are copyright free. Being the wild, wild west of the Internet this is a very silly assumption - so you still have to look at images to see if they breach the conditions laid out in my earlier post.
Photobucket's terms basically say if a user posts content into the public area, that they are making them available for others to use.
You do not need to take out a membership on Photobucket to access content and save images.
So how to use Photobucket?
http://photobucket.com/
Say I'm looking for an image of a glitter cat. I type 'glitter cat' into the search box and get some results:
http://photobucket.com/images/glitter%20cat/
Well, right away I can see some images that won't pass copyright muster:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/glitter%20cat/babz2626/myspacestuff/chestercat.gif?o=6
This is a Disney character from Alice in Wonderland, so it's not copyright free.
http://media.photobucket.com/image/glitter%20cat/sirdrinkalot2081/Glitter%20Pictures/cat.gif?o=16
This has a copyright declaration down the right hand side of the image, so it's not usable (great image though
).
http://media.photobucket.com/image/glitter%20cat/Daisy1771/Cool%20Icons/glitterfatcat.gif?o=82
This has a web site URL so it's not usable.
http://media.photobucket.com/image/glitter%20cat/dragonflytnmama_bucket/kittenwithwingsandglitter.gif?o=130
This has the text 'Rachael Hale' at the bottom, which indicates that it's using a photograph made by
Rachael Hale/ and thus, not usable.
This slightly scary, but oddly compelling image looks OK:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/glitter%20cat/southernbell3_1/whitecatgraphics.gif?o=34&sortby=popular
So I will save it to my computer and then add it to this post:
Now that is
glittery!
Warning: Going around the Internet and saving files to your computer is not the safest occupation in the world. I would encourage anyone thinking of doing this to have up-to-date Internet Security software.
Anyone wanting to test their image skills - please feel free to add to this thread as a practice
Take care,