It’s often said that a picture says a thousand words, but it’s often a hassle to have the time to take photo’s yourself, or to find a relevant photo to use in your blog post. There are tons of stock photo’s to choose from and download, but we rather liked the idea of being able to show off some of the great photo’s from Flickr that has one of the world’s largest online collections of photos that people have shared and may be used by third parties as long as they are in compliance with the photographers chosen Creative Commons license.

The Photo Dropper Plugin makes the process of finding suitable photo’s and inserting them into blog posts a breeze with the added advantage taking care of the Creative Commons license attribution automatically - with photographer credits clearly shown just underneath the photo.

Skelliewag wrote an in depth post (Nov 2007) about Flickr and Creative Commons licenses and how they apply to blogs. It’s an in depth explanation and one worth while reading.

Photo Dropper makes it easy to turn an ordinary text article into an easy on the eye, pleasurable reading experience and help the photographer get some well deserved recognition.

The Photo Dropper WordPress plugin is easy to use and integrates quickly into the ‘write post’ section after installation. Set your preferences and parameters in the ‘Options’ menu and all that’s left to do is write your post and choose your keyword.

To choose a Flickr photo to your liking - type in a keyword in the ‘browse photos’ menu, and in a few seconds you’ll be presented with flickr photo’s that fit the category/keyword used and within the creative commons license applicable, which saves a lot of hassle.

We haven’t quite found the right way to move the picture and credits around - so for ease and quickness we make a table and place everything in that so we can wrap text around without problems and making a mess of things.

To work around this, we place the cursor/mouse inside the table so that when we’ve found the photo of choice, we just click on either S M or L (small, medium, large) and everything as if by magic is placed nicely into the pre-formatted table including Creative Commons license and photographer credits.

We’re not techies, so could be that it’s us not understanding how to configure the photo, but we wanted to be able to move the photo and credits together at the same time, which as far as we can see can’t be done, so doing a table is a quick work-around solution.

Photo Dropper is a nice plugin and one worth taking a closer look at.