Sharing Your Images

Good Hubbers put a lot of effort into creating images for their Hubs. When they can’t take their own photos or make their own graphics, Hubbers often spend a great deal of time finding high quality images from other sources.

As you probably know from our helpful guide on image sourcing and attribution, not all images have licenses that allow you to use them. It can take quite a long time to find a Creative Commons or Public Domain-licensed image that fits perfectly with a particular Hub.

Because good images can be so hard to find, one fabulously good deed you can do is to share your own photos and images under a Creative Commons or Public Domain license.

Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons licenses enable other people to use your images so long as they follow the specific stipulations you apply to the license. For example, you might give an image a Creative Commons, Attribution, Noncommercial license (which, abbreviated, looks like CC-BY-NC). This particular license stipulates that others can use your image so long as they name you (Attribution) and do not use it for commercial purposes (Noncommercial).

Public Domain Licenses

A Public Domain license makes it possible for anyone to use an image for any purpose without naming its creator/owner. Be careful about giving your images a Public Domain license (or even a Creative Commons license), because even though you might change your mind about the license down the line, those who find your images while they still have a Public Domain license will be free to use it as they please for as long as they like.

Applying Licenses to Your Images

To get the right wording needed to create a Public Domain or Creative Commons license, we recommend using Creative Commons’ Choose a License tool (pictured above), which makes it easy to develop a license they meets your requirements.

While you have the option to apply a Creative Commons or Public Domain license to an image by simply adding the text the Choose a License tool produces, some sites, such as Flickr and Wikimedia commons, come with built-in photo uploading features that enable you to apply those license to your images in such a way that those images are also tagged with metadata that makes it easier for searchers to find them (this makes your images easier for needy image-searches to find).

For this reason, we recommend uploading your photos to Flickr, applying a Creative Commons license, and then citing them in your Hubs just like you would cite images by another Flickr user using the same license (this enables others to see that your images are available for use).