I continue to encounter too many educators who remain blissfully unaware that they are encouraging their students to steal intellectual property. They mistakenly believe it’s ok to use any image returned by a basic Google search. In fact, unless the searcher goes to Google’s ‘Advanced Image Search’ settings and opts to search only for “images labeled for reuse”, most search results probably cannot be copied or reused legally. The reality is that if the author retains the copyright, as indicated by the symbol above, an image (or video or song) cannot be used without the express permission of the author.
Happily, there is more than enough material online that can be used legally because it has been licensed under the Creative Commons, symbolized by the circle containing ‘cc’. Many thousands of people, myself included, use this license for what they share online–images, videos, music, blog content, etc. For more information about the Creative Commons, please visit their website. [I've also embedded a short video about about Creative Commons at the bottom of this post.]
For several years, I have used the search engine Compfight that can be set to return only Creative Commons images when I want to find images to use in blog posts or presentations. Now I’ve discovered an alternative that I really like.
Photo Pin is an image search engine that returns images licensed under the Creative Commons. It is straightforward and extremely easy to use.
1. Enter a search term and click the ‘Search’ button.
2. Place your cursor on an image that interests you.
3. To view the entire image, click on ‘preview’.
3. If you wish to use the image, click on ‘get photo’. This will bring up the dialogue box shown below where you can choose the size of image you wish to download. You are also offered a link to the original image, as well as code that you can copy and paste into a blog post or other website in order to credit the person who took the picture. I have illustrated this below the dialogue box.
