creativecommons

Helsinki Has a Website of 65,000 Free Photos Anyone Can Use

The Finnish capital city of Helsinki is the country's central hub of politics, education, finance, and culture. If you'd like a window into the history of the city, check out Helsinkiphotos.fi -- it's an online database of over 65,000 free photos that anyone can view and use.

wikiview is a Powerful Photo Browser for Exploring Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons has millions of public domain and freely-licensed photos available to the world, and now there's a powerful new tool that helps you dive into the ocean of imagery for exploring or locating exactly what you're looking for. It's called wikiview, and it's a graph-based visual image navigator.

Flickr Won’t Delete Creative Commons Photos Over New 1,000 Free Limit

Flickr announced a controversial decision this month to limit free accounts to 1,000 photos and delete extra existing photos of users who are already over the limit. Many people immediately wondered whether countless Creative Commons photos would be trashed. Today, Flickr reassured the photo community by promising that CC photos aren't going anywhere.

500px Nukes 1M+ Creative Commons Photos

500px just shut down its Marketplace stock photo platform in favor of selling photos directly through Getty Images and VCG, as the company announced a month ago. And as part of the major change, 500px has wiped out over 1 million of the Creative Commons photos photographers had uploaded to the service.

Beware: Behance’s ‘No Use At All’ is the Same Symbol as CC’s ‘No Rights Reserved’

Here's something that you should be aware of if you use Behance to share your photography portfolio online: the "No Use At All" symbol used by Behance is the same well-known one used by Creative Commons for "No Rights Reserved." In other words, with a casual glance, it may look like your work is in the public domain and completely free for everyone to use however they'd like.

The List is a Creative Commons App for Finding and Requesting CC Photos

Finding the perfect photograph to use can be a challenge. Most photographers seek to copyright their work giving them the exclusive rights to its use and distribution. When you simply want to use a photo for a school presentation or your personal blog, navigating the legal landscape can be a nightmare. Luckily, the folks over at Creative Commons have created an Android app to allow you to find quickly and request images that you can legally use.

Flickr Now Lets You Add Public Domain Photos and Release Shots to the Public Domain

Last week SpaceX posted its photos to Flickr and released them to the public domain. Unfortunately for the company, Flickr didn't have any public domain designation they could use, so even though SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the photos were public domain, the images were shared under a Creative Commons license that required attribution.

That has now changed. Flickr announced yesterday that it has created two new options for members in the copyright dropdown panel: public domain and CC0, which allows users to release content to the public domain.

Flickr Taking Heat from CC Photographers for Selling Their Work as Wall Art Without Compensation

Flickr -- a site that sometimes seems like the punching bag of the photo community -- is again taking heat from photographers, this time over their recent announcement that people can select from millions of Creative Commons-licensed photographs to buy as wall art.

The photos are being sold for profit, but none of that profit will go to the photographers who took the shots, and some of these photographers are speaking up about what they see as an injustice.

Flickr Opens Up 50 Million Creative Commons and Licensed Images for Flickr Wall Art

A little over a month ago, Yahoo! revealed Flickr Wall Art, a service that lets you turn your images into beautiful prints to hang... well... wherever you want them. Today, they're kicking that service up a notch by removing that pesky need for these photos to be yours.

No, you can't steal other people's photos and use them, but Flickr is opening up its entire Creative Commons library and some hand-selected collections from its licensed artists for your wall-hanging pleasure.

Dotspin: Rewarding Creative Commons Photogs for Sharing Quality Pictures

There's a brand new service in town that's looking to help out those photographers who choose to share their images for free with the online community. Powered by Creative Commons, the new website Dotspin uses a hashtag and voting system to determine a photo's quality and give the photographer a chance to earn credits towards rewards such as restaurant gift cards.

Bing Now Allows You to Filter Your Image Searches by Licence

As the saying goes: "better late than never." In a move that puts Bing on par with the likes of Google's and Yahoo's image search engines, Microsoft's search giant has just added licensing refinements to its image searching capabilities as well.

Wikimedia Now Lets You Contribute to Its Archive With a New Smartphone App

If you're interested in donating your images to the public at large, Wikimedia Commons just made it that much easier. For a while now, their online media archive has brought together a huge library of free-to-use content under one roof; and because images uploaded to Commons must be licensed as public domain, GFDL, CC attribution, or CC attribution/share alike, everything is free to use and/or share.

Now Commons is releasing a new app (formerly only available in beta) that will allow users to upload photos to the Commons archive right from their phone and, it's their hope, encourage more people to contribute "high quality educational photos."

A Flowchart For Figuring Out Which CC License You Should Use

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization founded in 2001 that, over the years, has released a set of licenses that enable creative types to share their work with others. The content creator allows others to use their work, just as long as the users follow the guidelines set forth in that particular license. It's a "some rights reserved" system rather than an "all rights reserved system."

In the photographic community, some aren't fond of CC licensing while others are downright prolific about it. But if you're looking to license some of your content in this way, this useful infographic put together by CC Australia will help you navigate the common licensing combinations.

PhotosNormandie: An Online Archive of 3,000+ CC Photos from WWII

One of the benefits of the digital age is widespread access to archives that might otherwise never be seen by more than a few people. A good example is The New York Department of Records' database of over 870,000 photos of NYC, and a new case in point is PhotosNormandie.

Yahoo! Image Search Now Helps You Dig Through All of Flickr Creative Commons

We're used to Google frequently improving things on its end -- most recently adding pan and zoom to Google+ -- but a constantly improving Yahoo! is a fairly new thing.

After numerous improvements to Flickr and a new Flickr app, Yahoo! has turned its photographic eye on Yahoo! Image Search. From here on out, you'll be able to search all of Flickr's creative commons images straight from Yahoo!