For bloggers and writers, finding high-quality, licensed, free images is often difficult, especially when you are pressed for time. PicApp has made life much easier for bloggers today with the enabling of its embed code on WordPress.com’s blogging platform. PicApp’s site has close to 20 million high-quality, legal and free images that are sources from partners including Getty Images, Corbis, Newscom, Splash News, Image Source, Jupiter Images and Pacific Coast News.
Similar to YouTube’s videos, PicApp lets anyone publishers to easily search and insert images into posts via an embed code. When the image is published, PicApp will feature a strip of related thumbnail images within the image. When you click on any of these, you are taken to PicApp’s site, where the images are hosted.
The startup also lets blogs link images to a branded or private label image search sites, where PicApp serves ads and shares revenue with content partners. Here’s an example from BlogHer.
Some of the actual content on PicApp is hit or miss. If you do a search for “Carol Bartz,” there are a few high-quality pics that are usable. But if you search for “iPod,” you are given 1,817 images to sift through and the first images that popped up in the results were of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise running in a park. A a blogger, I don’t have time to comb through nearly 2,000 images. That being said, all of the images on PicApp are quality, high-resolution and free to use. It seems as if the more specific you are in your search, the better the result will be. PicApp received $3.2 million in Series A funding last fall from Carmel Ventures.
Here’s an example of an embedded image:
