Creative Commons (cont.)
Activity 5 Creative Commons: using Flickr
The objective of this course activity is to demonstrate how the advanced search functionality within Flickr can help you to more easily identify images that you can re-use.
Flickr is a site for sharing photographs. The advanced search options in Flickr enable you to search within Creative Commons licensed content. You can restrict your search according to what you ultimately want to do with what you find. For example, you can search just for images that you can edit. This is a quick and easy way to ensure that you find material quickly which suits your purpose.
- Go to the Flickr website [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .
- Type ‘digital native’ in the search box. Note down the number of results you get. Click on some of the images, and look under ‘Additional information’ (on the right hand side of the screen to see the licence information, which details what you can legally ‘do’ with the material.
- Now try an ‘Advanced Search’. If you are viewing an individual photograph, you can get to Advanced search by clicking on ‘Search’. If you are looking at the thumbnails of your search results, the Advanced Search option should be at the top of the screen.
Scroll down the Advanced Search screen to find the Creative Commons options. Select the tick box called ‘Only search within Creative Commons licensed content’.
- Do the same search on ‘digital native’. How many items did you find this time? What you can ‘do’ with this material?
Discussion
When we did this search, there was a significant difference in the number of hits and what we were able to ‘do’ with the content we found. Restricting the search to only those items licensed under Creative Commons reduced the number of hits from 7000+ to around 1000, and what we could do with the material found was much less restrictive. However, you do need to be careful because of the different sort of Creative Commons licences, most of which do require that you give appropriate attribution for the images you use (e.g. if you are including an image in a presentation you may also have to include the url where you found the image).
Creative Commons