Guest Post: Image Codr for CC images

  by  NickDungeness 

I love the idea of Creative Commons works. The idea that a creator can set his or her own parameters on what is “fair” use is incredibly powerful. Policing image usage in a digital age can be quite hairy, however. Copy and paste, drag and drop, and “save image as” are all quick and easy ways to grab digital images from the web. Even those of us with the best of intentions for attributing our images often have a hard time keeping the proper documentation connected with the correct images. As an academic librarian, I really want to set a good example for my students by citing all of my images correctly, but I don’t want to have to juggle image files, CC licenses, and links to creators separately.

That’s where Image Codr comes in. As Image Codr says on its website, there are a number of steps involved in properly citing a CC image on a website.

• Make sure you understood the license correctly
• Get the correct HTML code for the IMG tag
• Link the image back to the Flickr photo page
• Give the author of the image proper credits (Attribution)
• Link to the Flickr profile of the author
• Link to the license the image is licensed under

 Image Codr works with CC images from Flickr to make sure that the CC license is understood, to link the image back to the Flickr page, and to give credit to the creator. All you have to do is find a CC image you like, such as this one:

Go to the Image Codr website and click on “Get code!” Enter the website URL, like this:

The result is a webpage that clearly tells you the parameters of the CC license and gives you a chunk of code to copy into your webpage with all the proper links and attributions.

And, voila! Here’s what the code looks like generated on this page:

  by  Robert S. Donovan 

I love this site because it takes the guess work out of citing CC images, which I feel is the one complicating factor of CC in general. This site gives a correct, consistent way to cite images on your website without having to do any hand coding. There is also the option to drag a bookmark from the “Get code” page into your browser’s toolbar, so you don’t even have to go to the Image Codr website once you’ve found an image you like.

As for finding CC images on Flickr, you can certainly use Flickr’s own interface by either browsing through their CC images or selecting to search in “The Commons” from the advanced search screen. Image Codr also has a simple search interface that redirects to Flickr. Another option, and the one that I use most frequently, is FlickrCC Blue Mountains. This is an external site that searches only Flickr CC images and redirects you to the Flickr page for grabbing the image. It’s a bare bones site, but I find it to be much easier to use for searching CC images than Flickr’s own site.

---

Meggan Frost is the Public Services Librarian at Paul Smith’s College in Paul Smiths, NY. As a librarian in a small school, her job requires her to be a jack-of-all-trades, although she spends most of her time trying to create great classes and workshops. A freelancing musician in a previous life, her interests in librarianship are centered on academic libraries with an emphasis on multimedia resources. You can read more at http://librarianmeg.wordpress.com or follow her on Twitter @doubleG2718.

Some Rights Reserved

Copyright at the university can be a complicated, confusing topic.  Perhaps a student wants to use a picture she found on the Internet and manipulate it for her art class, or maybe a librarian would like to share his newly created instructional video with other people.  Copyrighted images, music, or other creative works are difficult to get permission to use and complicated to share; the Creative Commons license makes this process much easier.  Up until recently, when a video, image, song, story, etc. was created, it always was protected with standard Copyright.  This meant that even if you wanted to share your material, and someone wanted to use it, that person would have to get permission from you to do so.  Now there is an alternative, a Creative Commons license.  Creative Commons protects the rights specified by the copyright holder.  Copyright holders can specify whether they will allow their creative work to be used for commercial purposes or whether the work can be modified, adapted or built upon.  Creative Commons licenses are free and anyone can register their creative work to be shared.

Searching for creative work with the Creative Commons license is incredibly easy thanks to the Creative Commons meta search. By visiting http://search. creativecommons.org/, you can search for all types of creative works in one place. Utilizing Flickr for images, blip.tv for videos, OWL for music, as well as two standard search engines and a media search engine, you can quickly identify creative content available to share, revise or remix. 

Firefox makes searching for shared creative work even easier by allowing you to search the Creative Commons search engine right from the browser search box- simply choose the CC option.

For those wishing to license their own works, sign up at http://creativecommons.org/license/.