Using Flickr and other pics in your blog

Ready to Entertain, a photo by Peter G Trimming on Flickr.


One problem with the internet is that it is easy to copy and paste and not think about who might own what is being taken. This class module number 9 is about using Flickr  and other image sharing sites in a responsible manner that protects an author's copyrights. 


I took the above cute picture off of Flickr. How did I know this image was okay to copy? This picture is registered with creative commons licensing with a simple attribution license. 
"Attribution means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give you credit."

To learn about creative commons licensing I would recommend going to their website. Not only can you learn about the types of licensing that allow different permissions, but you can use creative commons to put permissions on your own work.  


One type of creative commons licensing that most all of us could recognize is Wikipedia's use of the technology. Wikipedia uses:
Attribution-ShareAlike 

CC BY-SA

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

So you can see that there is a large variety of copyright permissions available for people to take advantage of legally; therefore, no one has any excuse for using a photo without permission.

Back to how we can use this licensing technology to improve our blogs!
Once you are on a website like Flickr, go to their creative commons section to find the a picture within the aproppriate permissions for your blog, artistic, or commercial purposes. Flickr has an upload to Blogger option. Then the image will be posted on your blog as a stand alone with the title of the picture being the title of your blog, and will be posted with proper credit to the licenser of the picture. If you want more to the blog entry, then edit the blog, add text, and change the title if you want, etc. There are many, many, many other ways to add licensed images to a blog, and there are specialized websites for this purpose. But many seemed too convoluted to me! So, if you are not that technically savy, I found that connecting my blog with Flickr and then editing the created blog post to be the easiest way.  I found if I just pasted in the HTML code directly into the blog, then the credit isn't there, and I'd have to reference and credit the image manually...no need to worry about typos in the citation or overlooked details if you post the image to the blog right through Flickr. 


If you have any reservations about how to use licensed images, the best thing to do is to use your own images, because there is more to image taking than copyright infringement (which is bad enough). Blogger warns against image taking can create an issue with stealing bandwidth from a website due to their server being opened (at server's expense) each time someone views the blog. It's just easier to give credit where credit is due!