Cut ‘n Paste Creative Commons Flickr Attribution Helper Now For Medium
I often feel lonely fighting for attribution for photos openly shared for reuse under Creative Commons licenses. Beyond advocating to a level of boring people, I have built a simple browser bookmarklet tool that makes the process of getting an attribution statement for web sites a simple cut and paste operation.
It’s more or less something I made for myself, because the round trip from flickr to my blog editor was about a 6 step round trip of cut and paste, and often I was not consistent.
Last week, Igot a question about flickr cc attribution helper:
I did not have anything per se, and what I told Noah is that I usually download the image from flickr, upload it to medium, and use the HTML attribution string from my tool to copy paste as a caption. Most of the images in my own stories I have added attribution this way, see an example.
As an aside, this demonstrates my rule to Always Be Attributing. You see, those are my photos, and if my decision to attribute was based upon rules and fear of breaking laws, I do not need to provide attribution for my own photos. I don’t need to ask myself permission. When we think this way, we are not thinking of how what we publish is perceived by ,maybe the 3 people that read my stuff — if they see stuff w/o attribution, they might see it as affirmation of the norm “anything on the web is okay to take and use w/o giving credit.”
But even that way of doing attribution is maybe 4 steps. Can I cut that out?
I did some tests, and have added a new bookmarklet tool that works for Medium (maybe other platforms with rich text editors, it probably would work in the wordpress visual editor).
Let’s say I am searching for open licensed flickr images about sharing (if you do not know how to do that, go directly to flickr search, do not pass Go, but do select an option under that top left menu that reads Any License), and I happen to come across a great one that says “Life is Sharing” (admission, again it’s one of mine. Am I just shilling my own pix?).
I click a tool I installed into by browser bookmarks bar, up pops a window:
In it I will see a mini version of the photo and the attribution text below. With my mouse, I select the image and the text, and do a command C (or copy).
The image will be embedded, but the attribution text will be in the editor line below, so it’s one more cut and paste to move that into the caption of the image:
But that is pretty easy? No?
Is there really a reason why writers on medium just do not bother to give credit for images? Because it is so hard to do?
Really?
Anyhow, this might help Noah out, and it was fun for me to tinker. It might be a bit hit and miss if you want larger images, because not all flickr photos have a large enough version to do the full page width Medium version.
“So How do I Get This Awesome Thing?”
- Thank for for asking! Go to the flickr cc attribution helper
- Select the size of the image you prefer to be pulling from flickr (note, I do see it might be better to be able to select the size from the attribution pop up, maybe I will redesign it soon). 640px is a safe size, 800px too. The larger images may not always have versions available.
- Select the menu option for Medium.com Attributor.
- Click, hold, and drag the turquoise flickr cc attribution helper button to your web browser’s bookmarks / favorites bar.
Now find a Creative Commons licensed image in flickr (you can also browse them from http://flickr.com/creativecommons — now click your new bookmark tool. You should get a pop up window that has the image and attribution you can copy in one, sweet move.
That is one:
It’s better than:
It may make you
Now only someone can get people with larger readership like Dave Pell to attribute images they use, readers might actually emulate.
It’s not about following laws or rules, it’s about a simple human expression of appreciation. And it takes now, two copy pastes to do it for open licensed flickr images.
Update
Modified the output for the caption to have links to the image, creator, and license. It is as fun as a mystery bone dug up from the ground.
