Nothing makes a blog post more eye-catching than a great header image, but not all publishers have artistic talent. And even accomplished digital creatives often crave some found material to start from or work with in a project. Luckily for all of the above, sources abound for finding a compelling photo to grab your readers’ eyes and draw them in, or to locate fresh multimedia to remix.

Creative Commons search

You may be familiar with the Creative Commons free licenses that aim to give creators more freedom to allow sharing and remixing of their content. If not, you can find out more about the history of the organization and the different types of licenses from their About page. The most important thing to note is that many CC-licensed images, audio and video files are usable on your blog or site, typically with credit given to the original creator — a quick and easy way to hat-tip the source of the media you’re using.

Here are several excellent spots to search large pools of Creative Commons-licensed images:

1. Creative Commons search: this search page aggregates several CC searches into a handy tabbed interface.

2. Yahoo Creative Commons search: search within the Yahoo index for CC-licensed media.

3. Flickr Creative Commons search: search just within Yahoo’s Flickr for CC-licensed images. This can be especially useful if you’re looking for photography in a more artistic vein.

4. Google Advanced Search: though Yahoo has been offering its CC-specific search for a while, Google much later caught up by adding some options to its advanced search interface. Expand the “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” link to access the “Usage rights” dropdown.

Free stock and public domain images

Need a professional-looking image but don’t have the budget for spendy stock photo houses? Check out these great alternatives for free stock photography. Much like with Creative Commons images, many just require attribution be given to the original creator. If an image is in the public domain, it is completely free for you to use for any purpose, altered or not, without credit required.

5. Stock.XCHNG: SXC is a community of photographers who share their work free of charge for use as stock imagery. Grab some shots from here, share your own, and chat with other photographers in the community forum.

6. MorgueFile: Using its own specially-adapted morgueFile Free License, this site offers free commercially usable and remixable high resolution digital stock photography without any attribution requirement so long as you don’t claim ownership or resell unaltered works as is.

7. Everystockphoto: A search engine for free photos, Everystockphoto also allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos. Source and licensing information for each image is available on the search results pages below the photo.

8. PDphoto: Thousands of royalty free and public domain images are searchable here, with high-resolution versions available for many of the photos for a small fee.

9. Openphoto.net: Offers photographic resources under Creative Commons licensing from an open network of photographers, focusing on animals, nature, landscape, architecture, still life, and technology.

10. FreeDigitalPhotos.net: Searchable collection of royalty free photos for corporate or personal use, with high resolution versions available for purchase.

11. PicFindr: Aggregate search engine for free stock images from several of the above sites and others, PicFindr compiles the search results into a single interface with links to the individual photos from their thumbnails.

WikiMedia Commons

Aggregating all of the associated media from the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, the WikiMedia Commons is a large database that includes primarily freely reusable images, audio and video broken down into their various license categories. To browse within the free subcategories, there’s a handy landing page branching off into various free license repositories, and you can browse by individual media types as well. Just be sure to note which type of license the image you want to use is under and follow the reuse guidelines for that particular license. Some useful collections include:

12. Public domain

13. Creative Commons

14. Sound

15. Video

Free audio sources

Whether you need some background music for a video project, some fresh tunes to incorporate into a music blog, or are looking for audio from a particular geographic location, these free audio file resources may have a usable sound waiting for you. As with the image sources above, always be sure to double check the license for any particular file you want to use and follow its attribution guidelines if applicable.

16. opsound: A community of musicians and sound artists, opsound contributors upload their works under Creative Commons licenses for sharing and remixing.

17. soundtransit: A searchable archive of field recordings from all over the world, soundtransit’s community shares recordings under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

18. pdsounds.org: The mission of pdsounds is to capture the acoustic phenomena in the environment of our daily lives and contribute them to the public domain for free and unfettered reuse. Search for something specific or browse the catalog of public domain sounds.

19. Internet archive open source audio: One subsection of the mighty Internet Archive collection, the open source audio section is primarily full of reusable Creative Commons-licensed sound files. You can also find usable audio files pocketed throughout the broader Audio collection as well.

Free video sources

Although almost everything including Tiger Woods getting air and browser-induced projectile vomiting is embeddable these days, if you need video footage that’s remixable or republishable these are some great destinations to check out.

20. Internet Archive Moving Images Collection: the Internet Archive is a big winner in this category, with thousands of free movies, films, and videos on hand featuring everything from classic feature-length films to zany educational shorts shown to impressionable school children in the 50s, 60s and 70s to cartoons now old enough to be in the public domain.

21. Open Source Cinema: A community site for creating and remixing video online, users upload footage under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

22. Vimeo: You can browse the videos tagged with Creative Commons or use a complex search query to search for videos tagged both “creativecommons” and the keyword you’re looking for.

23. Flickr: You can use Flickr’s Advanced Search interface to look only within video content that’s Creative Commons-licensed.

Further resources

Beyond the primarily larger collections above, there are many smaller sources for Creative Commons and remix-friendly media from individual creators, collectors and collectives. If you’ve got the time to traverse some of these, you could find even more usable media off the beaten path.

24. Wikipedia list of public domain sources

25. TeacherLibrarianWiki’s list of copyright-friendly image sources

26. NASA: The vast majority of images, audio and video published by NASA are not copyrighted and may be reused, although for commercial usage be aware of NASA’s non-endorsement guidelines.

More blogger resources from Mashable:

- Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles
- 25 Great Blogger Widgets
- A Guide to Protecting Your Online Identity
- 8 of the Best Social Media Extensions for Joomla

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Johnnyscriv

Tags: blogging, creative commons, public domain, remix culture

Have you ever wanted to copy or convert your personal collection of DVDs for backup or easy viewing on your Apple TV, only to be thwarted by CSS encryption? I feel your pain, and so do the good folks at Metakine. Lucky for us, Fairmount is here to help, and it’s free!

CSS, or Content Scramble System, is an approach used by most DVD manufacturers as a way to prevent unauthorized copies and unlicensed playback of DVD content. Unfortunately for consumers, this kind of digital rights management can be cumbersome for those who want to take advantage of their fair use rights. Fairmount makes setting aside this type of DRM extremely easy.

Fairmount works together with the VLC Media Player to decrypt your mounted DVD and replace it with a unencrypted disk image. It’s really simple to do. With a DVD mounted, just launch the Fairmount application and it will automatically and transparently hand off the decryption to VLC and then begin mounting a new decrypted image of the disk.

Once the DVD is decrypted, and the new disk image is mounted, you can then save the video files on to your network, convert them for playback on other devices, or burn the image back to a disk. The decryption is very fast and the exchange with VLC happens completely in the background. You even get a nice animation as the mounted DVD is smeared over with cream cheese, “Bagels are good!”

If you’re planning on burning the image to DVD, the Fairmount download comes bundled with another application from Metakine called DVDRemaster which will let you do just that. If you’re just interested in converting files for viewing on your Apple TV, iPhone, or iPod, I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend an excellent and free application called HandBrake.

Fairmount, VLC, and HandBrake are all free applications released under a General Public License. DVDRemaster is available in both standard and pro versions for $39.99 and $49.99, respectively.

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