I’ve been using Creative Co
mmons licensed images in my presentations for several years now. For most of that time, I’ve used an “Image Credits” slide at the end of the presentation to credit my sources. That gets to be a little unwieldy as I re-use images in different presentations: I have to find the original presentation I used it in, copy the slide, and then copy the credit from the last slide. More recently I’ve started putting the credit on the slide with the image (using CogDog’s Flickr CC Attribution Helper). Even so, to reuse an image, I have to find the original slide. In working on tomorrow’s presentation, I had a couple of slides I decided to not use. As I deleted them from the presentation, I realized that although I would still have the CC licensed photos on my hard drive, without using them in my presentation, I would lose the attribution data. Then it struck me: write it into the image itself. I could have just added text to the image, but that would have overwritten part of the image, and limit my choices for attribution in the future. Instead, I wrote the attribution link into the file’s metadata.
I opened the file in GIMP, and then from the Image menu, selected “Image Properties.” I clicked the “Comment” tab, pasted CogDog’s attribution link there, and saved the file. Now if I choose to use the image in the future, I’ll have the attribution information I need embedded in the file itself.
Oh, I like this.
Thanks. Now if only someone more technically adept than I would make a Firefox add-on to do this automatically while downloading. If Flickr hadn’t just laid off so many of their senior staff, I might even ask them to write it into their own code.
Thank you so much for sharing how you used GIMP to do this! I like to use GIMP and it is always great to hear of new ways in which programs can be useful. I am definitely bookmarking your post. Do you find GIMP to be helpful in other ways?
I use GIMP pretty frequently for more typical photo editing tasks: crop, resize, color balance. If you pull down the Colors menu and select Levels, there’s an “Auto” button that automatically adjusts the levels, and many times it does a great job of fixing the color balance to make an image look better–I almost always do that first thing on a photo. Often it’s an improvement, sometimes I can’t see a difference, and only rarely does it make things worse. I also resize and crop photos to 1000×750 pixels for use in presentations. That’s the size of the PowerPoint screen, so I get a full-screen photo without making the presentation unnecessarily large.
Thanks for the clever and efficient strategy for saving photo attribution info, Ted.
I asked this question every chance I got in the recent Creative Commons MOOC but never really got a clear response: Is it implied in the request for attribution that an actual link be provided? My strategy is to use Preview on my Mac to add a simple annotation to each photo that includes the Flickr photostream name, the date shot, and FlickrCC. That way I can use it in a slide show or blog and the attribution is clear — there’s just no live link. Don’t you think this meets the intent of the request for attribution?
Here’s the actual language of the CC attribution license:
My translation from the legalese: you must include the name of the creator and the title of the work, and if you reasonably can, also include a link to the original.
Thanks for prompting me to look up the text of the license–most of the attribution I’ve done so far has been a link to the photostream only, which by my reading of the license, is insufficient. Looks like I’ve got some cleaning up to do.
Thanks for going to the source, Ted. I’m really clear now on attributing to a CC pix online but how about on a PowerPoint slide. Including a mile-long url seems less than reasonable and useful to those who want to follow-through. I guess I could use a shortened url. What do you think?