What goes around comes around…

I have just added a Creative Commons attribution license to all my public photos on flickr. I thought that this might be a pain but in fact it proved to be easy to batch change the settings on my current public photos and then to alter the default setting on my future public uploads.

I have been happy to put the CC license on my work because it makes explicit to other users that I am delighted for them to use and modify these images (providing they give me a little nod in their credits). This is important to me because I have often found myself in a situation where I need an image of something (to illustrate an idea such as 'search engines') and having searched on the image I find that there is no licence associated with the image to tell me whether I am free to use the image or not. I have often found this a waste of time and nervous energy.

This situation is improving, however and there are some excellent search facilities now available for CC licensed images – for example – flickr has an engine at http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ . The Creative Commons organization also has a most-excellent search facility at http://search.creativecommons.org/ which draws on the flickr search and others such as google. The Lifehacker site has an excellent post on ‘6 ways to find reusable media’ which provides links to a lot of great sites such as WIKImedia.

BTW – The CC licensed image on this post is by Matt McGee at http://flickr.com/photos/pleeker/209616854/