Finding the Right Image

Every writer struggles to find the right image for their piece. Medium can help.

As an active writer and friend of many bloggers, I recognize the challenge in finding the right image for an essay.

Here’s a typical workflow on Medium:

1. Write
2. Brainstorm visuals that enhance the piece and align with the content
3. Translate those visual ideas into a search query
4. Hunt through various image catalogs, filtering for creative commons-licensed images
5. Once found, save image locally
6. Capture image source and creator
7. Return to Medium and upload the image with attribution included

…that’s a lot of steps.

Writers should be investing this time in creating original content.

So how might Medium help?

• Aggregate various image search engines (Google Images, Flickr, Compfight), applying licensing and quality filters
• Recommend images based on the content of the post using natural language processing (NLP)
• Include attribution for the selected image automatically

This could be extended to bring photographers/artists and writers together to make Medium a more collaborative experience.

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