You’d think after nearly a decade of blogging, I’d have shared my blogging resources with you already. Shame on me! Today, I was speaking with my awesome hosting company and they left me in such a good mood I wanted to write a blog post telling everyone how amazing and supportive they are. Then, it dawned on me, that along the years, I’ve faced many a pitfall, trying to find the services and applications that were a good fit for my blog. Rather than just share the one hosting company that has done the most for me, I thought why not share the rest of my favourite blogging resources too!?

None of these are affiliate links. I’m not making a cent out of you signing up or using them. I simply thought it would be ace to share these with you. I’m not quite at the stage of being able to give away a Macbook to help people on their journies, but I CAN share my knowledge for free! I’ve found many of these gems because of bloggers recommending them, so I thought I’d carry on the favour. In this blog post you’ll find my favourite blogging resources for editing images.

Blogging Resources for creating editing Images

Adobe Lightroom

I sign up to the photography package so it also comes with Photoshop but I’m yet to get my head around using it past the very basic actions. Lightroom is my ride or die friend. I love that you can set up bulk actions, such as adding tags, watermarks or presets to your entire uploads, saving you loads of time.

There are loads of free resources on the Adobe site along with many other free resources across the internet to get you up to speed with Adobe Lightroom. I promise, it’s not particularly daunting. Once you’ve used it for a while, you really can speed up your editing process monumentally.

I tend to bulk save images in a variety of sizes, both for high res use and smaller for Instagram. Then I will upload the Instagram images to the cloud so I can pull them to use on my phone as and when I’m ready.

I pay about £9.99 per month and I feel it’s money well spent.

Unfold App

I don’t do this religiously, but when I do have the time and urge to make my Instagram Stories look pretty, Unfold is my go-to application. You can use Unfold to create visually stunning stories featuring both video or photos. The app itself is free, but you can make in app purchases to buy different template packs. The templates are gorgeous and I admit to being tempted into a new pack more often than not.

You can edit colours, text etc and either save the stories to your phone or publish directly through the app.

Google Photos

I’ve set up my phone to sync with Google photos so images I take on the go are loaded into the cloud. This way, if I need an image I’ve snapped on my phone for a blog post, I don’t have to worry about emailing them to myself. They’re all set and ready to download into my blog when I need them, or into Lightroom if they need some editing. Also, I tend to upload images that I’ve taken on my DSLR and used in blog posts here too, or that I may want to use on social media. This way, they’re ready for me to browse and download on my phone, no matter where I am.

This is free to use and syncs across your devices.

Graphics

Canva

Canva is such a brilliant app for designing everything from your Pins to featured images. It’s free to use though some features, such as automatic resizing for different types of social, or some fonts and images are only available if you upgrade to Canva Pro.

What I love is how user-friendly and intuitive Canva is very intuitive to use and the range of templates is so vast that it’s easy to find something to fit your blog. You can change the colours and sizes of more or less everything, so it’s easy to make it on brand. I normally use Canva to create Pin covers for Pinterest, though you can make posters, infographics, social media posts etc too.

Canva Pro allows you to have multiple users, great if you have a collaborative blog and want to make sure your blogging resources are available for everyone. Canva Pro also allows you to have a brand kit. Your brand kit keeps all of your logos, colour schemes and fonts handy so you can ensure you are consistent with your messaging.

The regular Canva is free and you can upgrade to a paid Pro for £10.99 per month

This is one post in a series on my favourite and most used blogging resources. Be sure to sign up to my newsletter to keep up to date with future posts and get brilliant behind the scenes peeks! If you found this helpful, don’t forget to Pin the post and share wherever you can!