Two Ways to Find Images for Free, Open Use on Flickr

January 5, 2009

From OStatic blogs

If you’ve spent much time blogging or working in any form of electronic publishing, you’ve probably run into the sticky issue of copyrights on images. One wants to believe that copying and pasting any image from any web page is perfectly fine, but you can get in a heap of trouble if you ignore copyrights. Fortunately, among the several types of licenses for images that Creative Commons makes available, you can find ones that allow for free, open use of images found in large libraries. In this post, I’ll cover two easy ways to do this with the free photo sharing service Flickr.

As covered here, the CCOOo extension for OpenOffice makes it very easy to find photos on Flickr that you want to use and automatically insert them where you want them to appear. Best of all, the extension searches only for images with Creative Commons licenses that allow for free use.

I am also a big fan of CompFight, which adds a lot of flexibility to the Flickr search process. It’s a web site that allows you to search for images on Flickr in numerous ways. To the left of its search bar, you can choose to search only by tags for very targeted searches, or toggle for an All Text search. If you’re looking for images that you can reproduce without worrying about copyright issues, you can also use CompFight to restrict your searches to photos that fall under the Creative Commons license. And, you can toggle to a Commercial setting for commercially usable photos.

Creative Commons has several licenses, including one that specifies intent for commercial publication of photos. The terms for all licenses are found here.

Flickr is old enough now that it’s pretty good for finding stock images for almost any purpose. Using the tools described here, you can make sure you are using images in permissible, free, open ways.

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