[Video Tutorial] How to Easily Add Pixabay Stock Photos to WordPress Sites

I’m kicking off a new feature: Discovery Video Tutorials.

During a Discovery tutorial, I test a tool or product I’ve never used before, live. You’ll see the exact process I go through to install and use the product, and I’ll point out problems, glitches, or happy discoveries I make as I use it.

WP Pixabay Plugin

Today, I’ll show you how to install and use the WP Pixabay plugin for WordPress.

Pixabay is a popular stock photo service where you can download free images, vector graphics, illustrations and videos under Creative Commons licensing (a public copyright license).

The beauty of this plugin is that you can completely bypass logging in to Pixabay, and pop Pixabay images directly into blog posts and pages on your self-hosted WordPress website.

It’s critically important to use at least one visual in every blog post. Our brains process visuals much faster than text. Visuals help us feel emotionally connected to the subject matter, and they help us remember what we read.

Speaking of Visuals…

During the video, I’ll walk you through how to install and activate the free version of the plugin. I’ll test the plugin on some images and point out its strengths and weaknesses.

Watch the video tutorial. (Click the “open arrows” icon in the lower righthand corner of the video to watch fullscreen.)

Something I learned AFTER filming my tutorial

After I recorded my video tutorial, created the blog post, and had everything ready to go, I double-checked The Publicity Hound‘s e-newsletter (where I learned about the plugin). Turns out I reviewed a different plugin than Joan Stewart recommended. My bad!

The plugin Joan recommends is Pixabay Images 3.0, and it’s free. I believe it is the official Pixabay plugin, whereas the one I tested, WP Pixabay, is an open source plugin by WPClever.net.

In a future Discovery Tutorial, I will test Pixabay Images 3.0, and I’ll let you know which plugin performs best.