As all experienced bloggers know, including images in posts is a great way to attract attention and garner engagement. For some bloggers that means using stock photo services, but many choose to find their images on sites like Flickr that host easily searchable Creative Commons-licensed images. The Flickr search engine Compfight makes finding the right image very easy.

While the stock image libraries can be a great source of images, Flickr and its cousins provide a wider array of images that are less likely to have become familiar through overuse.

We have seen far too many images of suited business men and women shaking hands or looking thoughtful. Many photographers license their work under terms that allow use on both commercial and personal sites, only requiring that attribution and a link back to the source is given in the article.

One of the more vexatious aspects of blogging with WordPress is that it offers no easy solution for including a link as part of the image caption (or rather it didn’t until very recently).

Bloggers have found a variety of ways around this limitation, including putting the attribution link at the bottom of posts, beneath the main text, and making the image itself a link to the source. None of these are as elegant as a simple link below the image in the caption.

The obvious solution of switching to HTML mode and entering the code for a link there doesn’t work because WordPress strips out or escapes the HTML when switching back to visual mode. If you’re the sort of user that is comfortable sticking with HTML mode, then the problem doesn’t arise, but that is quite a small subset of users; many value the convenience of visual mode.

The easiest solution, as of early September, is simply to update WordPress installation to the latest version. WordPress 3.2.4 supports adding basic HTML, including formatting and links, to image captions via the ‘Add Media’ dialogue.

If you are unwilling or unable to update to the most recent version — which we would strongly advise you to do for security reasons — there is a plugin available that will replicate the same functionality.

The Links in Captions plugin adds the ability to include HTML links and shortcodes within image captions. It works with versions of WordPress from 2.5 to 3.3.2. 

Via Smartmediatips