This page contains various technical tools and tips for enhancing your Online Content with images and media.

Image copyright & privacy

For ethical use of images, see the Page on Canvas called Media Guidelines And Forms. You may need a signed form to borrow someone else’s image. You’ll need a different type of form to take a picture of yourself or a fellow student for a web page. Creative Commons images found online do not need forms, but still require citation.

Finding images online

Flickr is a free online photo management and sharing application by Yahoo!. It hosts millions of images uploaded by users and professionals.

Flickr is better than most other sources online (stock photo sites, Google images) because you can search a huge database of images limiting your search specifically within Creative Commons content.  When you find such content, the information is all organized in the same way, easy to find and use.

Flickr also provides you the HTML code to paste your image into a post or page so that it follows our Media Guidelines.

You and your team can also create a Flickr page where you can organize your “favorites” found for use in websites you create. For example, see Dr. Smith’s Flickr Favorites, a vast collection of thumbnails of photos which are all Creative Commons images found for use on her professional and academic online projects. If you have a Flickr user account, then you can click the “favorite” star when you see an image on Flickr that you want to keep in your favorites list.

Searching Flickr

• Flickr’s Creative Commons page explains the basics and allows you to search images by CC license type.
• You can also use the Flickr Advanced Search, type in your key words, and scroll down to select “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” and “Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon” if you might want to crop the image.

Using Flickr images

• Double-check that the image you are using has a Creative Commons license.  It is easy to navigate away from limited search results and into a person’s photostream, where other photos are NOT licensed for reuse.  Look in the right-hand column under the heading “License” to see a link
  to its Creative Commons license.  If you see the Copyright symbol there, do NOT use it.
• Respect Flickr’s Community Guidelines on the use of images:
• “pages on other web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr. This provides a way to get more information about the content and the photographer.”
• “Don’t use [Flickr] to host web graphics, like logos and banners.”  When you upload images into a blog or website, you usually have the option to upload from your computer, OR to give a URL where the image resides online. If the image appears on more than one page or a frequently used page, it’s more ethical to choose #1 — upload it into your blog/website so that the image is hosted on YOUR site, rather than embedding the URL of an image hosted on Flickr.  If you let Flickr host the image, then whenever a viewer sees your website or blog it will “grab” the image from Flickr, and that cuts into their bandwidth.
• A free Flickr account is useful if you want to create your own library of images you use, like or upload.
• “Favorite” an image to collect other people’s images you’ll consider
  using on your website.  This will make it easy to find the URL and photo
  information in case you need to link to it on your website.
• Example: tsmithucalgary is the Flickr account where I store my “favorites” of the original images that I use in website development.

Image Editing

Images cropped and edited using IrfanView
From “Remake/Remodel 1: Thomas Zummer…” by UNIONDOCS (2010) on Flickr

First make sure your images are obtained ethically and will be cited and captioned properly.

I recommend the following FREE programs

• Picnik online image editor. No registration required. Great for adding text, resizing, colorizing, framing

• IrfanView image editing program.  Download to your computer.  Don’t let the old-fashioned, simple interface fool you — it is incredibly versatile.