Some bloggers like to include a stock photo in each of their posts relating to the content of the post. I personally feel that doing so in each and every post is too repetitive. I prefer to include my own photos when relevant, or an affiliate banner when I'm posting to promote a product or merchant. Otherwise I like to save the space for a Google ad unit which will hopefully be relevant to the post topic, and generate a few extra clicks.
However, for those who do like to use stock photography, there's a new blog pictures service called acobox which should make it easier. You no longer have to resize the photos yourself and copy them to your own server. With acobox, you simply select the size you want and copy the given HTML into your post. The image is hosted on their server. Best of all, it's completely free.
I decided to try it out (the photo you see here is one of theirs) and see if it might come in handy for me once in a while. The first thing I noticed is that the selection is a bit limited. I searched for photos of computers, and only got five results. Hopefully this might improve as more photographers join and contribute, but I'm a tiny bit skeptical. What's in it for them?
Once I had selected a photo, it was pretty easy to customize it to the size I wanted and get the hotlink code. Photos are available in widths of 100 pixels to 500 pixels, in 100 pixel increments, which should be adequate for any blogger. My standard in-post photo size is 200 pixels wide, so that's what I selected. When I copied the code, I noticed that they choose to use the ALT attribute of the image to advertise their site. I find this disappointing, as that attribute's true purpose is to provide a text description for users who can't see the image (such as those using text-only devices or browsers, and the visually impaired). Just seeing the words "Blog Pictures | acobox.com" isn't terribly useful, and might leave readers confused as to the relevance of that text to the rest of the post. Under the assumption that changing this would be a violation of the terms of service, I'm afraid that I would not choose to use acobox in the future until they decide to use the ALT attribute properly.
![[photo of me]](/glasses144.jpg)
![[album thumbnail]](/photos/flood2010/thumbnails/albumthumb.jpg)
![[album thumbnail]](/photos/oregon2009/thumbnails/albumthumb.jpg)
