No one wants to see a picture or video of his or her nice Uncle Jim next to a story about a political scandal. To avoid such no-nos, start by choosing an appropriate Search Term. We provide a handy list of them above the crowd-sourcing tool using tags from your story, but you can also type in your own terms if ours aren’t cutting it.

Ta-da! The results! In this case (below) you can see that Flickr has found 41 photos and YouTube has 4 videos that match your search criteria. It can get pretty crazy... just try looking for "flowers," "kittens" or "puppies"...we're talking millions, here, people.

If the photo or video suits your story, all you need to do is to click the orange [+] in the upper right-hand corner of the image to add it to a queue of photos and videos ready to be plucked and added to your story.

If you want a closer look at an image or want to preview a YouTube video you can click on the image thumbnail. You can move the preview window anywhere on your screen that you want by dragging it from the top grey bar.

When you’re ready click “Add to Story”. A couple of things can happen now. If all of the photos you have selected are from your Portfolio or the NowPublic Archive, they, long with the YouTube videos will be added to the story... and you’re done. Check out the story and you’ll see your footage has been added.

If you’re a Wrangler and you’ve picked photos from Flickr there is one more bit of party etiquette required: you have to write the owner a little love note asking their permission to use the photo(s) you’ve picked. We’ve gone ahead and written a template to help you describe what NowPublic is about and why we depend on user’s contributions.

It’s your job to explain why you are requesting this photo in particular (be brief and personal, it’s not a dissertation). When you’re done, click on the “Send Request” button. [learn more about requesting photos]