Creative Commons in flickr

when you search the image site flickr under the groups tab for ‘creative commons’ you will get a results set with a lot of group pools with a specific focus.

my quick search retrieved

• insects in creative commons
• flowers in creative commons
• nature in creative commons
• architecture in creative commons

why do you care?

at some point you’ve worked on a powerpoint presentation and have looked to insert some images to jazz it up. flickr may be a good resource for this. the images that are in the “creative commons” pools are put there by photographers that want you to use their images. by looking in the ‘flowers in creative commons’ pool, for example, you will only find pictures of flowers, and only pictures with creative commons licenses.

when you find an image you like, scroll to the bottom right of the page to look at the license. here’s a screen shot of what it looks like:

when you click your mouse on the ‘some rights reserved’ text you will be whisked to the creative commons website, which tells you what the restrictions on the image’s reuse are. in this case the photographer permits you to reuse the image as long as you credit him as the author. easy enough! please note that not all photographers permit you to reuse their images, and those images will have this text for their license:

experiment with this now so the next time you’re preparing a presentation you’ll already know what kinds of images are in the creative commons pools, making your preparation that much easier.