Using my Creative Commons-licensed photos

Since I’ve become a photobug and licensed those photos under the Creative Commons, I’ve been getting a lot of requests for reuse. After all, that’s what CC-licensed content is for!

The “BY” bit in CC licenses, which stands for attribution, means authors/creators must be attributed if you decide to use a work. It does not specify how a work should be attributed or cited (though, there are some guidelines in CC’s FAQ), leaving it up to the owner of the work—which is the way it should be, of course.

Flickr does a terrible job letting people know how to attribute works. If you’re reading this, I’ve probably directed you here asking how I’d like you to cite or attribute any of my photos.

If you’re just using a photo, simple add a line like this somewhere near the photo, with the appropriate hyperlinks:

Name of photo, linked to Flickr photo page © Samat Jain, used CC BY-SA 2.0.

If you’re creating a derived work (that is, you modified the photo in some way), please use:

Derived from Name of photo, linked to Flickr photo page © Samat Jain, used CC BY-SA 2.0.

Summarized in an example:

Now, a rant on why I ask all for all this. There are just two reasons:

1. I have a philosophical agenda to promote open source and free culture. I’m hoping the explicit wording and hyperlinks do so.
2. I’m putting photos I took time to take and process on the web, for your free use… asking for a little credit (in exchange for link-fu) is not much to ask! Linking to Flickr fulfills Flickr’s ToS; linking to my homepage makes me happy; and linking to the appropriate license hopefully promotes free culture, informing users of their rights. To that end, if you can, avoid creating hyperlinks with nofollow.

Lastly, if you decide to use a photo, please let me know! I like to keep track of these things, and may link back to your use of my photo. Thanks!