Yahoo has added a filter for finding public domain photographs in image search. This is a huge step forward, as people in the past have often believed (incorrectly) that any image available from search results is free for the taking. This just isn’t so, so beware of running an image search and snagging a pic to adorn your website or blog!
Truth of that matter – most images online are still the property of the photographer or artist, and you simply are not allowed to use them without his or her permission. There are rare exceptions when the images are very old or there is a licence that allows for this kind of use, but sometimes this is not readily apparent.
Creative Commons (CC) has provided the most popular way of tagging images for public use. I always turned to Flickr’s advanced search to find CC images, but with the major search engines adding this to their own search functionality, I won’t have to log onto Flickr and weed through pages and pages every time I need a good image.
Yahoo! added a “Creator allows reuse” filter last month. Now if you go to Yahoo! Image Search, you can search for a motive (like, say, Old Faithful) and then click on “More filters”.
You can tick the box for “Creator allows reuse” and then select either “Commercial use” and/or “Remix, tweak, build upon”, depending on your need. When you click on any of the images found in the resulting array, Yahoo! will add information telling you just how much the photographer allows their work to be exploited for commercial and other types of reuse.
You’ll still be using images from Flickr, just supported by Yahoo’s search technology (apparently Flickr is the only serviceallowing for this kind of systematic tagging that is big enough to bother with.)
Also, if your a bit of a geek, you can tweak search parameters to filter out images in the public domain, according to Search Engine Land:
Public Domain Images: Add &as_rights=cc_publicdomain to the URL
Creative Commons Attribution Images: Add &as_rights=cc_attribute to the URL
Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike Images: Add &as_rights=cc_sharealike to the URL
Hopefully this indicates that Google is testing a similar filter and will add it to their advanced search options soon. So far, MSN’s Bing has no image search with a like filter.
Tags: Creative Commons, Flickr, image search, Yahoo