Finding, Using and Referencing Creative Commons Images

I may have mentioned before that my favourite tool for searching for images online is Compfight.   With Compfight you can search Creative Commons licensed images using keywords specifically by tag or description.  Compfight is great because it usually returns lots of image results for any search.  Here I have searched for Cape Town and uncovered over 11,000 images licensed under Creative Commons that I can use.

Once you have found the image you like a single click will take you to the Flickr page where the image resides.

The terms of the license for the image can be found on the right side of the page slightly down from the top.

This particular image is licensed under a Creative Commons-Non Commercial-No derivatives license.  This means I can not use the image for commercial gain nor can I make any derivative versions – the image must be used as is, non-commercially.

Once you have found the Creative Commons image you want to use and you have checked to ensure the license terms are appropriate for use, I suggest using ImageCodr to extract the license.

Select ‘Get Code!’ from the top of the page and copy and paste the web address for the Flickr image.

Imagecodr will give you a small piece of HTML code that you can use to display the image with the Creative Commons logo bundled together as one.  It also creates the link back to the source photo on Flickr as well as to the Creative Commons license terms.

You can select at what size you would like to display the image.  The code in the box at right can be copied and pasted into any blog or webpage.

If you are sourcing images for Powerpoint, documents or offline work, I find it works quite well to simply select the image and license which ImageCodr creates for you with your mouse and copy and paste it where you want to have it used.  Sometime this requires a little bit of tweaking to make it look just right.

Selecting the image and license text.

Copy the image from your browser and paste it into any applicaiton you want to display it in!