Websiting

I spent most of today going back through older posts on my photo tips website. Some of the flickr photos weren't showing up, so I had to fix that by uploading the problem photos to my own hosting and then changing the images src to point there. One of the photos was still on flickr, but I noticed that the user had changed the description of the photo to say that you need to ask them if you want permission to use it.

While I can understand that, the reason I like using Flickr for finding CC licensed photos is that it saves quite a bit of time - you don't need to spend time messaging the photo's owner and waiting for their reply, and the owner doesn't have to spend time checking and replying to every single license request they get. What would be nice is if Flickr added another CC category - CC with reservations. This could be for photos where the author is willing to give a CC license but would like you to contact them first (for example so they can check you're not going to use the photo to promote something they don't agree with).

I think that putting your photos under a CC license and then adding restrictions in the photo description would also be problematic for services that use the Flickr API - the API would think that the photo was CC licensed and can't parse the description for any restrictions. As it currently stands I think it would be better for people who want to add restrictions to usage of their photos to just put them as All Rights Reserved, and then write in the description that can be CC licensed on request.

Anyway, rather than contacting the user in question to get permission to use a photo I'd already been using, I just swapped for a different CC licensed photo. Quicker and easier.

Many of the older posts on my website had a few amazon ads for relevant books etc. in them but used images that were licensed CC non-commercial to illustrate the article. Personally I wouldn't say this was commercial use, but the ads don't make any money anyway so I removed them unless they were illustrating part of the article. (e.g. For a section of an article about tripods it makes sense to have a photo of a tripod from amazon).

Also, for an article about stock photography I replaced most of the 'stock style' Flickr photos I had in there with photos from istock.

In the evening I did some research on a possible Scotland holiday, and did some armature making & plasticine modelling as well.