File this under Public Service Announcement.

Since nearly every cell phone has a camera, and since advanced editing tools are available for free, it makes no sense to steal a picture from the internet.

I know it’s easy to do.  Just do a Google image search and you’ll find exactly what you need, right?

Once you find the image you can just insert the image via the URL that way you don’t have to worry about uploading it to a server.

That is unless the image was originally put up by someone who had a Google alert for anything linking back to their site.  That would be a bad thing.

Why you ask?

We’ll let’s just say you have a sweet little blog called Faye’s Blog.

You did just that and found the perfect picture and stuck it in your post like this:

It looks nice.  Good job!  

There's one problem though.

The owner of the image (the same one who carefully hand crafted the image Credit Crunch) happens to have a Google Alert set to look for anything that links back to his site.

Within minutes of your post, Google sent that same owner an alert pointing him to your post.

The owner could then substitute yet another image into his server files replacing the original image with something less appealing than what you might have first found.

You can guess this might not be such a good thing.  You see by the owner replacing that image with anything he wants, the new image now instantly shows up in your post!

Oh - Oh!  This isn’t going to look good to Faye’s readers…

Faye’s Bio says…

I’m currently at the University of Aberden doing an MLitt in English Literary Studies.

Good for you Faye. 

Next post I'll show you how to find and properly use pictures you find on the internet.

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