Crediting Creative Commons photos made easy

Cre­ative Com­mons is by any account a tremen­dous suc­cess. Since its launch in 2002, hun­dreds of mil­lions of works have been licensed for re-use with one of the Cre­ative Com­mons licens­es. The licens­es are avail­able in a grow­ing num­ber of countries.

Illus­trat­ing web arti­cles with Cre­ative Com­mons-licensed pho­tos is a wide­ly used way of improv­ing qual­i­ty in small pub­li­ca­tions like ours. As so many oth­ers, we use Word­Press as pub­lish­ing sys­tem, and we have post­ed CC-licensed pho­tos since our launch in 2006.

But one aspect of using CC pho­tos in Word­Press has not been as easy as it should: Giv­ing the pho­tog­ra­ph­er the cred­it he or she deserves. Or, more to the point — the attri­bu­tion that is a pre­con­di­tion for repub­lish­ing the pho­to­graph in the first place (see “Best prac­tices for attri­bu­tion”).

Now we have done some­thing about that our­selves. The Word­Press plu­g­in Cre­ative Com­mons tag­ger, cre­at­ed by Håvar Skau­gen, adds new fields to the media upload tool. When you upload a pho­to to Word­Press, you are asked to add the rel­e­vant meta­da­ta — image title, source URL, Author, Author URL and cru­cial­ly, the right Cre­ative Com­mons license.

The cus­tom fields on the media page where you can fill in the licens­ing information.

When you add the pho­to to an arti­cle, the cap­tion is now enriched with the meta­da­ta and the cor­re­spond­ing CC license icons.

Foto: Ele­na Pérez Mel­gar­e­jo cbnd

Åpen mikro­fon på biblioteket?

At this point, the plu­g­in only sup­ports the Nor­we­gian, US and inter­na­tion­al ver­sions of CC licens­es, but more local­ized licens­es will be added in the future. The plu­g­in also sup­ports local­iza­tion via the pro­vid­ed .mo-files.

If you have read this, you are prob­a­bly inter­est­ed in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of con­tent on the web. In that case, you would per­haps want to check out our oth­er Word­Press plu­g­in: Wikipedia for tag pages auto­mat­i­cal­ly con­nects your tag page/topic page to the rel­e­vant Wikipedia entry.