Finding Digital Images

A picture is said to be worth a thousand words....but where do you find pictures for presentations or video projects?

You can go to Google, type in a few search terms and do an image search. You will find images, but there might be legal issues with using these images. You cannot just take an image that is someone else's creative product and use it. For a one time use that will not be made public, you can probably use the image with appropriate footnoting. However, the best solution is to find images that have a Creative Commons license and are available for use without charge for non-commercial purposes. Although there are different types of Creative Commons licenses requiring you to do different things to use the photo in your project, most only require an attribution giving credit to the author of the photo (more about that later.) If you find a photo that you like in Wikopedia, you can typically click on the picture to go to a page that will tell you if the photo is free for you to use. You can find Creative Commons photos by using the advanced search options of Google and Yahoo (click links for more information on how to do this.) Another great source for images is Flickr. We will discuss Flickr here because I think it could provide some useful materials for your projects. I did a really quick search for images using broad search terms for each of your video topics and found groups of images that might be useful to you.

Flickr is a photo-sharing site that allows to you upload your own photos and add comments, descriptions and tags to them to make sharing more useful. Flickr is also a place where you can go to find photos that other people have uploaded. Here we will look at how to use Flickr for finding free images to use. You can use Flickr to store and share photos that you might take with a camera while working on your projects. There is a very nice video screencast that gives you the rudiments of searching Flickr for photos to use in a project

In order to use Flickr to acquire images that other people have uploaded, you are not required to generate a Flickr account. However, if you do sign up for a free account you will receive a terrabyte of photo storage. .If you already have a Yahoo ID and password that you use to access some other Yahoo service, you can sign in and will already have a free Flickr account alloted to you. You can access Flicker at www.flickr.com. From the homepage you can either create an account or begin searching.

You can search all of Flickr using the search box at the top right of the home page. When you type in a search term you can choose to search everyone's photos. Searching for photos related to Iceland Geothermal brings up a page full of photos. We could scroll through potentially thousands of photos or use the advanced search feature to apply filters. You can filter your search by narrowing your search query to force the inclusion of certain words or exclusion of others. You can also filter by media type, date and limit your search to the Creative Commons.

Another way to search for photos is to click on the Explore menu item.

From the Explore page you can access photos from specific localities that have been geo-tagged. You access this type of filter by clicking on the World Map menu entry. This brings up a map with a search box. Clicking on the "Search the map" button will bring up a search box.

If we type Iceland Geothermal into the search box as shown in the graphic, the map of Iceland with location pins shown below is returned:

Clicking on one of the pins will bring up images tagged to that location. Clicking on the thumbnail picture will take you to that picture's page where you can see if it is a picture you can use without obtaining permission.

Notice that this picture could not be used in your video without permission because it is copyrighted by the photographer.

Flickr and the Library of Congress began a project to make photos from the world's public archives available to the public in 2008. This archive is called The Commons and is a great place to search for historical pictures. You access The Commons from the Explore page. There are all sorts of photos, sketches, book graphic plates, etc. in the archive. Here is an interesting picture showing food being cooked by geothermal water. If you click on a picture it will bring up a full-sized version along with information about the picture.

Remember that unless a picture you wish to use is published under a Creative Commons license or is listed in an archive as available for public use, you need to get permission to use the picture in your project, or you may be infringing on someone's copyright.

The Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is a license that allows an author, artist, educator, etc to specify how his or her work may be used. It defines a spectrum of possibilities between full copyright and the public domain, i.e., from all rights reserved to no rights reserved. Many of the photographs on Flickr have Creative Commons licenses. The most useful license for you is the CC-Attribution license. This licensing allows you to use the photo, and all you have to do in return is give the photographer an attribution (credit). Other photos may only allow use in non commercial works. Some allow you to edit the photos while others may allow you to freely use the picture as long as you do not alter it. Other photos on Flickr may have all rights reserved so you can't use them without permission. If you don't want to look at an entire group of pictures finding one you like only to learn it has all rights reserved so you can't use it without permission, use the advanced search option. You still need to check the level of Creative Commons to make sure you can use the picture in a legal manner, but none will have all rights reserved. When adding the Creative Commons filter to our Iceland Geothermal search, we get a lesser number of pictures from which to choose.

Here is a sample picture of some people bathing in a geothermal pool. When you look at the fully detailed page for the photograph, you will see the copyright information about that photo given in the right sidebar with other information about it. The side bar shows that this picture is a Creative Commons picture as long as you give attribution to the photographer and use the picture for non-commercial purposes.

The symbols outlined by the red box tell you what the restrictions are for the use of this photo. You can find the details of the different levels of Creative Commons and the symbols for those levels detailed here.

For more information, read this article on "How to Rock Flickr Like a Champ".

Many museums, organizations and libraries have images that they have made either public domain (no copyright so free to use in any way) or have Creative Commons copyright. Here are a couple more links that you might find useful:

• Public Domain Images from Burningwell

• Q&A response from the New York Times

Happy hunting!