Creative Commons is supposed to be this great way for people to license out their works to others. But it’s annoyed me for ages how lame it is in practice, when it comes to Flickr.

Let’s say I want a picture of a car to use on my commercial blog. Using the Flickr Advanced Search page, I enter “car” and select the “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” and tick the “Find content to use commercially” option:

In the results, I find this really cool picture of an old Desoto:

Notice the big red arrow pointing to the description. There’s nothing here that tells me how this work is licensed or how to attribute it.

Well, elsewhere on the photo’s page at Flickr is this:

Now, I can’t even read those icons, much less know what they’re supposed to mean at a glance. But that’s OK, because it’s fairly obvious that the “Some rights reserved” text is a link that might tell me more. So I click on it, getting this page:

Well, kumbaya! Look at that feel-good stamp. “Approved For Free Cultural Works.” I feel so collectively good. This kind soul is saying anyone can use their photo using this license, as long as:

You attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Um, so where’s the attribution manner “specified” on that photo? Remember me pointing at the picture description? There was no “manner” of attribution indicated there. Am I supposed to:

• List the URL where I got the picture from in text (say if I use on a slide)
• Link to the URL of the photo page (if I use online)
• Use the photographer’s Flickr name (if I use online or elsewhere)
• Use the photographer’s real name (assuming I can figure it out; that’s not always easy)
• Assume since no attribution was specified, no attribution is required?

I’ve seen the first four methods used, and I’m sure there are other variations people have come up with, since many CC licensed pictures under Share Alike fail to specify how they should be attributed (for instance, the first 10 “Share Alike” pictures I found in a car search at Flickr had no attribution info on their photo pages).

Even when you do get attribution, things aren’t always clear. For example, TechCrunch took heat today for using some images without attribution.

Mark Lobo wasn’t happy when TechCrunch used one of his images from here in this story without the specified attribution (Mark Lobo Photography):

See how I’ve pointed to his attribution guidelines? Pretty straight-forward, right? Well, did Mark just want that exact text used, or did he also want to have a link to his site with that exact text? Are the rules different if used in an offline manner, where no link could be provided?

After some tweets, a credit was added, which seems to have made Mark happy, even though the attribution doesn’t match what he specified:

The TechCrunch link says only “Mark Lobo,” not “Mark Logo Photography,” and it points to the photo page on Flickr, rather than Mark’s photography site of http://www.marklobo.com.au/, which he specifiies.

TechCrunch is also a commerical site, and the picture was originally licensed for non-commercial work. But it’s pretty clear from Mark’s tweet that he’s good with the usage now. Still, you can see how things can be confusing.

Here’s another example where even with detailed information, things can still be confusing. Michael Gray called TechCrunch out on another photo used without attribution in this story.

In the picture’s description, it says simply “comcast van.” Underneath it, the first comment is from the photographer, who’s quite detailed and flexible in his attribution request:

I’ve presented it here under a Creative Commons license. You can use it but you need to present a photo credit and shouldn’t go photoshopping it into something else or use it to sell something.

The attribution can simply be a text photo credit that is a hyperlink back here – that’s what Gawker Media sites do for the pictures they use from their flickr pools.

TechCrunch (I guess eventually) went with naming him and a link back to the photo. But the “attribution can be” part of his guidelines implies that attribution could be something else.

Flickr’s a major place where people seek Creative Common images. It shouldn’t be guesswork to figure out where attribution guidelines are (in the description? in the comments?). Both photographers and publishers wanting to use their works need Flickr to help expand what are proper, standard guidelines for attribution.

That brings me to the big uproar over the Obama White House photos that went up on Flickr with a licensing description that caused some people to think they weren’t in the public domain. They always were in the public domain — it was just that Flickr didn’t have the right type of licensing option to show this when they were uploaded. But having the wrong license didn’t somehow pull them out of the public domain. It just gave some people the wrong impression they weren’t public.

That’s all fixed now. Flickr’s got a US Government Works license that now shows up. Meanwhile, over at the White House, they’re using Creative Commons to cover material that the public shares with them. The White House copyright page tells you:

Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Click on that license, and you’re told:

Cool! The White House has some specific info on their license that I wish Flickr photos could have. How’d they do that?

Well, hit the Creative Commons site, and you’ll see that if you make a license there, it allows you to embed specific attribution information into your license:

Flickr should tap into this. It should prompt you to add that type of information into a unique license for each photo, perhaps pre-populating the license with information you can fill out once (say your name, your web site and so on).

Still, you can see there are further issues. It’s great that the White House says shared images can be reused with attribution by linking to the White House. But what if you’re using the image offline? Is text enough? I’m guessing so, but it probably should say.

When I first launched my
personal blog, I meant to have a few photos at the top
rotating in. I didn’t use Flickr then, nor did I ever get photos in place by
uploading them to my own server. I finally got picturelicious tonight,
thanks to Chris Person’s great tutorial,

Add a Styled Flickr Photo Stream to Your Blog.

I came across his guide when I was looking for some new designs for my blog
here and for the Daily SearchCast,
plus a few other little projects I’m doing. I thought of blogs with looks I
liked, and Aaron’s SEO Book was one of
them. Chris did Aaron’s blog, I
learned, so I headed over to Chris’s
place and found the tutorial.

Here are a few tips from my experience tonight, if you decide to dive in.

In Step 2, Chris tells you to get your Flickr badge using a link that’s
pretty prominent in the screenshot he shows. That link seems to have done in the
wake of Flickr’s "gamma" redesign in
May.

Hunting through the help files, I finally found the
Flickr Badge page. Then I
continued on with his steps. When I got to the style part, it sort of freaked me
out, even with him simplifying stuff. Part of the problem is that Flickr throws
a bunch of styles at you that actually are commented out and not used, as best I
can tell. You can use them, if you
know what to do. If you don’t, it’s just scary crud.

I’ll get back to that, but I found myself more interested in the process of
choosing what to feed to the stream than styling it up. Using the badge maker,
you can decide to show ALL your public photos, just some that are tagged in
certain categories or those from a specific set.

At first, I just grabbed photos from my
SES San
Jose 2006 set. Then I wanted more. I didn’t want all my public photos,
however. Some of them are pictures I’ve put up to illustrate things, rather than
fun ones of people. As a solution, I created a new tag:
photostream.
Anything I thought would be cool to show in my photostream got tagged this way.
Flickr’s rocking Organize feature that
Dave Naylor turned me on to made it easy to quickly add this tag to a bunch
of my photos.

Down the line, this also means it’s possible to easily make photo streams for
different pages. Next time I do a post on a topic where I also have a lot of
photos, I’ll create a stream just for pictures tagged with that topic.

When you make the stream, Flickr lets you choose 1, 3, 5 or 10 pictures.
Well, I wanted 7. No problem. It was pretty easy to figure out the coding.
You’ve got one key line like this, which I’ve broken into the key elements.

http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?
count=7
&display=random
&size=s
&layout=h
&source=user_tag
&user=26286356%40N00
&tag=photostream

I used the badge maker to generate it initially with 5 photos, then I changed
the number next to count= to 7, and that was it. It doesn’t look like you can
have more than 10 pictures, but by changing the number, you should be able to
get whatever count you want between 1 and 10.

I originally went with thumbnails, like this:

Then I changed my mind. The problem was that it looked great when everything
was horizontal. But the vertical pictures made it hard to fit neatly alongside
my logo (if you don’t see any, try refreshing this page. Pictures are randomly
selected each time).

That’s why I shifted over to a square display. It made everything nice and
neat (Frank Gruber at Somewhat Frank does
this as well — another site with a nice design I like, especially that big fat
feed icon and subscribe box in the right-hand corner).

Of course, what would be great is if Flickr had a way to let me quickly sort
and only show horizontal photos automatically. Looking quickly, I didn’t seen an
option to do this. Moreover, the batch editing in the Organizer makes everything
into squares. It’s impossible to use that to quickly remove any vertical pics out
of your photostream. Here’s wishing for the feature in the future.

The last step of the badge maker lets you do some customization of the box
holding your pictures. Annoyingly, you can’t drop the Flickr logo as part of
this. Hey, I went Pro. Don’t make me have to remove it manually!

OK, so you have to. It’s pretty easy. In fact, like Chris (but far less
skillfully and knowledgably), I dumped a ton of the crud coming out of the
generator.

The pictures in this post above basically rely on this old fashioned table
and one style element:

<style type="text/css">
.flickr_badge_image img {border: 1px solid black !important;}
</style>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="10" border="0" id="flickr_badge_wrapper">
<tr>
<td>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?
count=5&display=random&size=t&layout=h&source=user_tag&user=26286356%40N00
&tag=photostream"></script>
<td>
</tr>
</table>

Maybe there’s more that could go, and yes yes, I know I should
be making tableless tables with CSS. CSS rocks. It awesome. And someday, I’ll
have time to play with it more. Until then, I’ll hire Chris — if he wasn’t so
damn busy!