5 Easy Ways To Source Photos for Social Media

Hey! My name is Alyah Donahue, a Social Media Intern here at Homemade Social! I wanted to share a social media tip I have learned during the past 6 months I’ve worked here.

At Homemade Social, one thing we specialize in is planning and scheduling our client’s Instagram feeds. Many of our clients provide us with some photos or news that needs to be shared, but when posting 5x or more each week, we find it necessary to source photos from the good ol’ Internet as well - especially to achieve that ~aesthetic~ we’re all craving on our Instagram feeds.

• Discover Tab in Planoly

  • Planoly is one app that we often use for scheduling Instagram content. Planoly has a Discover tab where you can look up different users, hashtags, and free stock photos. Planoly will pull the Instagram photos from that account or hashtag you searched. You can save any of these photos to your feed and it will include the caption which often will have the the Instagram handle that the photo belongs to, so you can tag them in your repost and give credit. Giving photo credit is so important!!

• Search & Repost Feature in Later

  • On the sidebar menu of Later, there is a discover tab, you can tap on ‘Search and Repost’ where it will bring up a page where you can do essentially the same thing discussed above on Planoly. Search for content and save it. When you save it, it will show up in your unused library on the calendar page of Later. It will also save the caption and hashtags that the original user posted. If the photo credit isn’t listed with the photo and we cannot find the original owner, we simply do not use those photos.

• Later Browser Extension

  • When we find a photo that works well with the Instagram grid we are planning, we use a Later Extension that you can install onto your Internet browser. Now, when you right-click on a photo, there is an option that will say ‘Add media to library’ this will add the photo to your Media Library in Later, including any description, link, or information that is attached to the photo. You can also use this extension on any website that you find an image you like such as, Tumblr or a blog.

• Pinterest

  • Saving photos from Pinterest is also something we utilize. This can be a bit more tricky considering not every photo on Pinterest has the best quality or any description to be able to give photo credit. However, there is still content on there that is worth resharing.

  • Tip: You can utilize the Later Browser Extension mentioned above to easily save photos from Pinterest to your Later library!

• Screenshot

  • Lastly, one of the most simple ways to find photos to repost is by scrolling through Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc and screenshotting a post, cropping it, and adding it to our grid planner. By doing this, we can then see who originally posted it and give them credit in our caption, however it can be a bit time-consuming.

That about sums it up! If you’re looking for more tips to streamline your content production process, check out our Own Your Instagram Course and Social Media Template Pack. Until then, we’ll catch ya on the Gram and in our social media newsletter.

xo,

Alyah