Link love, Creative Commons, and attribution

Most of my photos uploaded to Flickr are licensed with the Creative Commons “Attribution – Share Alike” license. This means anybody is free to use my photos for any purpose with certain conditions (more on this below). I do this hoping it can be helpful to the people who use my photos to illustrate their blog posts.

I’m thrilled, for example, that Michael Yglesias used one of my photos to illustrate a post on sprawling, unwalkable California cities. And I love that LA Green Girl (and crossposted to Blogher) used this Caltrain photo to illustrate her article on using public transportation to lose weight.


Friday night

Flickr makes it super easy to find these “free to use” images — just click the “Creative Commons” box in Flickr’s advanced search. Google’s advanced image search also has various “labeled for reuse” search options as well.

I don’t do this for purely altruistic purposes — if I scratch your back, I’d like you to scratch mine as well. I tell photo users how to do this in my Flickr Profile so it’s not difficult to find. I ask for attribution using my name and — here’s the part everybody messes up — a link to Cycelicious. The Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license specifies: “You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor,” and “the manner specified” by me includes the link to Cyclelicious when my photos are used in an online work.

Again, I love that you all are using my photos. I’m glad they’re helpful to you. But pretty please link to Cyclelicious as well? Thank you!

One Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.