Fair Use for Images
Written by Kalle Westerling
This class, as you know, requires that you upload images to your post. But where are you going to get theses images? You have two options.
- You can use images that you have created yourself (photographs, drawings, paintings, etc.); or
- You can used images that someone else has created. However, if you go this route you will need to abide by fair use norms. Not all images online are free for you to use. Regardless of where you find your images, you MUST include image credits (image attributions) in your posts and projects.
You can freely use Creative Commons-licensed materials (see info below about CC licenses) as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Here are good (and not so good) examples of image attribution. Usually, a photo credit is printed below the image as a small caption. It is NOT enough simply to copy and paste the url of your source. Instead, you will need to include as much of this information as you can:
Author/Creator, Title, Date, URL address where the work is hosted, type of license it is available under (can use the abbreviations, or the official CC logos), Keep intact any copyright notice associated with the work.
In order to attribute properly, it is important that you keep track of all the images that you use as you go. Re-finding materials later can be very difficult and time consuming!
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that provides free, easy-to-use legal tools that give everyone—from individual creators to major companies and institutions—a simple, standardized way to make creative work they own the copyright to available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.
Where can I find CC-licensed images?
You can search the Flickr Creative Commons page, or do an Advanced Search in Google (for Usage Rights, click on “free to use share or modify”). There is also Fotopedia.com, a “collaborative photo encyclopedia” that includes Creative Commons-licensed images, information about the images, and additional goodies. FlickrStorm also lets you search for CC –licensed images that you can safely use in your projects as long as you cite them. Of course, you can always use images you generate yourself!
Here are some additional online resources for locating CC images compiled by Medium.com contributor, Dustin Senos, in his post Stock photos that don’t suck: A list of places to find the best free stock photos.
- Little Visuals
- Unsplash
- Death to the Stock Photo
- New Old Stock
- Superfamous (requires attribution)
- Picjumbo
- The Pattern Library
- Gratisography
- Getrefe
- IM Free (requires attribution)
- Jay Mantri
- Magdeleine
- Foodiesfeed
- Picography
- Raumrot
- ISO Republic
- Getty Images Embed use the embed code they provide
Fair use fundamentals infographic
