14 DAY TRIAL // Flickr has announced that it now houses more than 200 million photos published under a Creative Commons license, which enables viewers to freely distribute, copy and even modify or use commercially in some cases, the images.
This makes Flickr the largest source for Creative Commons (CC) licensed photography on the web. What's more, it's something that sets it apart from more mainstream and generalist photo sharing options, Facebook in particular.
"We are proud to announce that – thanks to you – we now have 200 Million (and counting) public Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr. This makes us the largest CC photo repository in the world!," Flickr's Kay Kremerskothen announced.
"You can browse and search those CC photos by license, or find exactly the one suitable for and available to you by using advanced search, ticking the CC checkbox, and searching for whatever image you are looking for," she added.
Licensing a photo as CC enables others to share and build upon it while you still retain copyright on the image. It also means that you're not forced to issue a licensing agreement for everyone you want to be able to use the photo.
A Creative Commons license, contrary to what some believe, is a copyright license. There are several CC license types, with varying degrees of freedom, but even with the most extreme, CC0 through which the author basically relinquishes all rights to the photo, the legal copyright remains with its creator.
The most basic such license enables others to freely copy and share a photo. Less restrictive ones enable them to modify the image, or indeed any work that is licensed, or even to use it commercially. Most require that the original author is recognized, what is called "attribution."
Flickr has offered this licensing option for years, but others are only now catching up. Recently, both Vimeo and YouTube have added the option. Picasa has had CC licensing since 2009.
"If you would like to take part in CC and provide your photography under a less restrictive license than 'All Rights Reserved,' familiarize yourself with Creative Commons, and apply a CC license to you photos, by either changing your default license upload setting or an individual photo’s license under 'Owner settings' on any of your photo pages," Flickr explained.