Using Zemanta to Find Free Images

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Zemanta is a plugin available for Firefox, Explorer and Chrome. It is also available as a plugin for Blogger, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and more.   In this post I'm going to show you how you can use Zemanta in Blogger to find free images for your blog posts. In my other tutorials I have mainly focused on WordPress because that is what I use and love, but today I'm going to use Blogger as an my example.  So in order to get started using Zemanta, you have to first install it.

Install Zemanta

The Zemanta website provides full and complete instructions for installing it in a browser or using it as a content management system plugin (which is what we are doing today).

Please make sure you are logged into Blogger before beginning in the installation process.

To start installing on Blogger, go to:

http://www.blogger.com/zemanta.g

Choose the blog you want to install Zemanta on and click “Add Zemanta”.

And that's it.  Zemanta is now ready to use on your chosen blog.  Now on to how to actually use Zemanta.

Using Zemanta

When you make a new post on your blog, the Zemanta Assistant will automatically appear on the far right side.

You can click the “Get Inspired” button and some images will appear, as will some recent topics that might inspire you to get writing.

We’re going to enter our own article instead and see what Zemanta comes up with instead. Once you start writing, Zemanta will analyze your text.

Suggested images will appear on the right side, as you can see above. If you change your text, you can click the “Update” icon on the far right side and it will update your selections.

If you don’t see anything you’d like to use, you can click “Refine” and enter some keywords.

We have entered “woman” and “stress”:

And are given new options. Now when we see an image we want to use, we can put our mouse over it to see the license information. You can also click through and see more license details.

To add the image just click it. Zemanta will keep track of the images you have added by marking them as “Clicked”. It will also insert the image, with proper attribution into your post.

Zemanta is relatively easy to use, but seems to be limited in the number of appropriate images returned, even when keywords are entered. It also displays a lot of images that are for non-commercial use.  That's it in a nutshell.  There are some additional settings you can customize such as: positioning of the image, code style, Amazon affiliate ID, and more.

This post concludes our series on finding free images to use on your blogs legally. If you missed any of the other posts in this series, they are listed below for you to read.

If you continue to have any questions, please don't be hesitant to ask them in the comments.