The variety and quality of images on Flickr is amazing. The search to find a topic or a specific field is now very accurate which is great for the person who wishes to use licensed copies for their own website.

I have found in many cases the quality of the images on Flickr is superior to the commercial royalty free sources. The images have a look of spontaneity and freshness. Generally there are at least a few to choose from and the selection of Creative Commons images is easy.

This really is made possible by the generosity of individuals who wish to share their photos without payment .  The requirement being  attribution and compliance with the terms of the license. Both these are easy to deal with.
The process in outline is:

Type your search description or keyword(s) into the search box.



This will return all the images classified under your search.  It will contain both Copyrighted and Commons licenseimages and videos. Currently there are very few videos compared to static photos.




Scroll right to Advanced Search and click the heading




You will be taken to another dialogue page with various options.


 

Select the Creative Commons option(s) and scroll a little further down to the SEARCH button and click.



 
You will now be presented with a similar page of images as shown initially but all these will be licensed to use under a Creative Commons license.
Select the image you would like to review and it will be redisplayed at the published size.  If you now wish to keep a copy of this Right click and Save the image with a new name preferably, as the nomenclature used in the catalogue is non-intuitive. Not really an issue if you only wish to use one image but if you are selecting a number then it makes it easier to give the image an intuitive clue. 




 
Record the name of the image in Notepad. Scroll over to the right of the image and you will see the Creative commons heading. Click this.


A redirected page on Creative Commons will be displayed with a description of the license and the specific image license as a line of code. If you click this line of code it will copy then paste it into the Notepad entry.  You now have the information required for attribution of the image. (It seems as if it doesn't copy on click with FireFox but by right click and Copy it works).






You can now paste the image into your Blog post and below paste the line of code as HTML. On display your image will show and underneath this will be the attribution and Creative Commons License. The font size and colour is able to be varied using the blog text tools available. 




http://www.flickr.com/photos/liberato/ / CC BY-SA 2.0



 About Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is a system of licensing which enables the owner to license their work for free use with a choice of various conditions associated with the work. So it allows an owner to share their work and have this work attributed to them. They may also state for example that the work may or may not  be used for commercial purposes, may or may not be modified.  Creative Commons