Adding Stock Images from within WordPress for Free

Running a website is no cakewalk. There are so many aspects to it, that if not managed and optimized, they can quickly pile up and overwhelm the unsuspecting site administrator. The smart thing to do would be to prioritize and only spend time on the things that add the most value – like actually writing the content or making those unavoidable phone calls.

In this 2-part series, we’ll look at finding and using the right stock images from within the dashboard itself, with the use of plugins and services.

Where Do You Look For good Stock Photos?

Stock photos are the best resort for the majority of site owners who want professional quality images but simply don’t have the time, money or know-how to create these images on their own. Maybe, a few years ago, it would’ve been near impossible to find good image content, but today there are lots of premium (such as iStock, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock and Depositphotos) and free (such as Pixabay, Unsplash, Stockvault.net, PikWizard, and even Wikimedia Commons) sources for them – all with a huge variety and great quality.

While this saves a lot of time and effort compared to actually taking and creating photos, you would still be going back and forth between the stock photo sites and WordPress, saving the images, then optimizing, cropping or resizing them for your site, and in general, taking the joy out of writing and publishing content. You need something to make the process seamless, not add more to your pile of tasks.

So, in Part 1, here’s the first of two ways to keep you on the content and let you add stock images right into your writing workflow:

Instant Images

Connekt is a studio of web designers-developers who have made this ‘Instant images’ WordPress plugin that lets you directly upload stock images from Unsplash to the WordPress media library for your posts. Everything that you get via the plugin comes with the Creative Commons Zero license – so you can use the images modified or otherwise, even commercially, and without needing permission from or giving credit to the owner or even to Unsplash.

The plugin, which enables you to scour the Unsplash library from within the WordPress dashboard, and upload the images effortlessly, is free, widely used and well-reviewed. Here are the steps to set it up:

• Download the plugin from the repository or search inside the dashboard from “Add New” plugins.
• Once downloaded, go ahead and give the plugin a trial run with the key provided with Instant Images. However, once you’re satisfied with what the plugin can do, you have to head over and sign up for an account with Unsplash, so that you can avail of your API key that unlocks long term use.
• Next, you’ll have to complete your developer registration with Unsplash. In the ‘reason’ field, feel free to input ‘Instant Images plugin for WordPress’.
• After this, you’ll need to fill out an application. On an auto-approved application, the account provides for 50 searches or queries per hour. For the vast majority of WordPress bloggers and businesses, this is a generous limit. If, however, for whatever reason, you need a higher limit, you just need to provide more details in the subsequent application. Be advised, though, that 50 searches an hour is more than sufficient for our purposes; higher limits are usually for other use-cases, like an app that displays images.
• Open the settings of the plugin, and enter the API key. You can, of course, also directly search the Unsplash library for images with a max resolution of your choice, right from here2.
  The next time you write or edit a post, you’ll find the “Instant Images” icon in the WordPress visual editor that lets you start a search.
• Enter a keyword, search and click on the desired photo and it gets uploaded to the media library. To insert it into the post, click on ‘Add Media’ and insert it. They’ll likely make that extra step a thing of the past, and from an SEO standpoint, it would also be nice to let us rename the file after we select it. Here’s hoping.

Conclusion about free Stock Photos with WordPress

Et Voila! Effortless, quick, high-resolution, relevant stock photos for your post. One advantage of uploading the image to media library first is that any plugins for image optimization, say Imagify, will work just fine, as they do their magic as the image is being uploaded to the library.

We’ll see you in Part 2 with another premium, but an extremely versatile alternative to this method.

Photo by Kaique Rocha from Pexels

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