How to Share Your Photos Through Creative Commons

Hi this is Rich Brooks with Flyte New Media. We’re a web design and internet marketing company.

If you’re like me, then you’re probably six feet tall left handed. But on top of that, you’re probably a blogger too. And if you’re doing a blog one of the nice things is to add photographs that add a little bit of life to your otherwise text heavy post. But if you want to stay on the right side of the law, then you also have to be careful about where you get these photos if you don’t want to be paying for them.

Now here is the example right here of a post I have called the Dangers of Relying on Google for Business. I’ve got an image here. I'm giving a little bit of credit to car renting. I was able to do this through a service called Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is kind of like an alternative to strict copyright law as they gives you a little bit of control over how and when people can share or use your information and how it should be attributed back to you.

What you can do is you can go to the Flicker and go to Creative Commons page there and you can see all these new posts but you can also do searches on specific keyword phrases that might be in your blog. So for example, here is a search I did on Maine Lobster and then I can use these images as long as I’m giving credit back to people.

Now that’s great but I started wondering today how exactly do I list my own photos as being able to be shared with my own regulations and stipulations through the Creative Commons. And it turns out it is really easy.

Just go to Flicker.com/ Creativecommons and then you can decide which of the different licenses are appropriate for you. There’s attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative and sharealike. And so once you’ve decided which one you like, you can just go ahead and click on the Add a Creative Commons license to your photo stream and then choose which one you want. I’m going to choose just attribution and then click on set default license.

I could also go up to Batch so I get a batch a bunch of photos if I didn’t want to batch them all and then click on—but I’m going to click on set default license and there it is. And now my photos are available within the Creative Commons search.

If you are looking to increase your own online visibility in that of your photos, you might want to take a look that. And if you’re looking for photos to use on your blog, be sure to visit Flicker as well and look for the Creative Commons icon.

That’s it for today. This has been Rich Brooks of Flyte new Media and I hope this was helpful. Take care.