Collecting & Sharing Stock Photos

It is important when developing instructional materials to avoid potential copyright issues. One great way to do this is to take your own stock photos to save for future use. Think about things you might like to be able to post pictures of on a course website or use in a presentation. Science teachers might want a picture of a beaker or a lab or a tree, history teachers might want pictures from a museum, English teachers might want pictures to inspire poetry or writing projects, math teachers might want pictures that could be used to show how equations appear in real life like a half-built bridge or building, etc. You may want pictures of campus or the capitol or a pencil or backpack. Foreign language teachers may want to take some vocabulary pictures.

• For example: Some random stock photos (I took most of these on UNL's campus on Thursday, June 14, 2012.)

I used picasaweb to store and organize my pictures so that I can also share them with others and post them as part of my professional teaching portfolio. Here's how I did it: (be sure to click on the photos if all you can see are little gray icons)

1. Start by logging into Picasa and clicking upload.
2. Name your album
3. Highlight and drag your images here 
4. Click Ok at the bottom once it's done uploading 
5. click on one of your picture and select add location 
6. a map pops up where you can search for a place 
7. zoom in and move the pin to exactly where you want to identify and click save location 
8. click on the + tag symbol to the right of tags 
9. type in some words that describe the picture to make it searchable (if you need to use a phrase or multiple words, use "quotes" around them) 
10. Click on the title of the album at the top of the screen to go back to a full overview and choose "Actions" and them "album properties" 
11. here you can change the title and description and other info but most importantly! check the privacy settings! You may choose "public on the web"; "Limited, anyone with the link"; or "Only you" depending on who you want to be able to see the album. If you wish to share it, choose one of the first two named options 
12. save changes takes you back to the overview, now chose "captions" 
13. this gives you an overview where you can tab through and create a caption for each photo 
14. going back to the overview screen notice the options on the right 
15. click on "link to this album" to get the link to share with others