picapp Offers News Photos to Bloggers and Sites - Free

Need to use on your website but concerned about possible copyright infringement? picapp may be the answer for you. In its FAQ, the company says:

picapp.com is a free online service for adding high-quality stock photos to blogs and websites – without the copyright and legal headaches. Registration is free, and picapp.com members have legal access to the best and most current stock photo collections on the web. Inserting picapp.com images on your site is as easy as 1-2-3.

It's not the same as embedding a regular image. What you're embedding is Javascript and Flash. That also means it's not that simple to resize the image. Above isn't a real embedded picapp image, but a screenshot of one (so I could resize it). In fact, I tried altering the Javascript to resize the original image, and what happened was the script kept trying to load, and load, and load.

For many sites, being able to resize images is important, so that will limit (somewhat) picapp's audience, until and unless they change that.

BTW, in the above image you see above an embedded ad, which is, of course, how picapp makes its money.

Also, it's not the type of thing I'm going to use for this site. I tried searching for "router" and didn't find anything that made sense. The above image was the result of a search for "Iron Man movie." I hope it would bring up an image from this summers probable blockbuster, but instead it brought up an image from a 1931 image of the same name.

Searching for "George Clooney," however, was much more successful. This type of service might be good for a celebrity news site or one that needs a lot of stock photos.

Since they're embedding ads, is it possible they will share the revenue? The FAQ hints at that:

Can I make money with picapp.com?

Stay tuned!

They're going to need a lot of embeds to make money though (the ads I saw weren't too compelling), so will this service make it? Better search, different types of images, resizeability, these would all help picapp. We'll keep an eye on it.