7 replies
16h31m
Google Image search has an option under Tools (seems like you need to search first to get it to show up), then you can pick one of unfiltered, "Creative Commons licenses", or "Commercial & other licenses".
7 replies
12h37m
Related: Openverse[1] is an open-source search engine for openly-licensed media. It indexes CC-licensed and public domain images (including CC0) with filters for license types. Disclosure: I am a maintainer for Openverse.
1 replies
6h20m
commons.mediawiki.org is also a great resource
0 replies
37m
You mean: https://commons.wikimedia.org/
0 replies
7h16m
that is great! Love it.
0 replies
6h48m
Looks amazing, is there anything similar available for video? The official creative commons search tool (https://search.creativecommons.org/) is pretty poor.
0 replies
6h49m
Thank you for your work. While looking for references of past artifacts, this website has been so valuable.
0 replies
11h54m
Thank you for maintaining it. I haven't used it very often, but sometimes was a blessing when I was just searching for some dummy image for a presentation or whatever (like some PCB, code or whatever).
Really like it!
The search engine from OP seems a little bit off. I tried some technical search terms and it didn't really produce anything. Maybe that's just not what it's for.
0 replies
2h30m
The other day I noticed that the only platform where illustrators post that supports CC is DeviantArt, and it doesn't have a way to search for CC work since its redesign years ago. There doesn't seem to be anything like Flickr but for cartoons, clipart, and illustrations. There are free clipart websites, but those are mainly third-party. This means illustrators on Instagram, Twitter, or Tumblr who choose to license their work as CC have no machine-discoverable way to do so. This is a very unfortunate turn of events. It's very easy to find CC photography and music made by someone on the Internet, but it seems almost impossible to find a drawing licensed the same way.
When I see an article with an ugly AI-generated cartoon at the top, I can't help but think we could have articles with cool random artwork by real people instead if it was as easy to find freely licensed artwork by living artists as it is to just generate something with AI. It feels like there's a huge hole there that doesn't exist in photography (thanks to Flickr), doesn't exist in video (Youtube lets you tag your videos as CC), doesn't exist in audio (many years ago Newgrounds created an entire audio section just for CC music that could be used in flash games/animation by other users), but somehow exists in illustration.
Even in OpenVerse, if I search for "illustration," most results will be historic. I realize that in most cases it doesn't make a difference, but I really wish I could have a URL to link to. I wish I could say "here's this picture, and here's a link to this guy's portfolio, who put this on the internet and let me use it."
Is there some method I'm not aware of or is this just how it is?
5 replies
16h58m
I really don’t like how the source information isn’t available. Someone at a library or archive put effort into preserving and scanning things but that’s all omitted, and if you want any other metadata you’ll likely need to do a reverse image search. This also makes me wonder how reliable the public domain labeling actually is.
Infinite scrolling looks cool but also means you can’t easily get back to any given result.
1 replies
16h27m
Yeah, it seems like a promotion for Cosmos. I saw some planet drawings by Andreas Cellarius from 1660 on the default page that included "(not openly licensed)" in the info text. Even if they are public domain it looks like a quick scrape.
0 replies
13h49m
There was a similar implementation of this idea a year back, but it was open source/indie. Anyone know what it was?
1 replies
12h46m
I looked up the information such as the name of the work or the artist on Openverse and was able to find the image, as well as more information about the licensing. For example, I found many of Charles Lemaire's botanical drawings [1] on Openverse [2], where I could get CC-BY licensed versions from Flickr, and links to their CC0 version from Rawpixel. Disclosure: I am a maintainer for Openverse.
I agree that is very hard to go back to a result, and also impossible to share a link to a specific result because the URL does not update. But as long as you are in a continuous session, the works you visit are added to a dock in the bottom-centre area of the page where you can go back to a result you've previously seen.
[1]: https://public.work/cacti%20iconography [2]: https://openverse.org/search?q=Charles+Lemaire
0 replies
6h17m
Yeah, in some cases it’s not too hard to look things up but the metadata is inconsistent (I just saw a date 1700-2006) and since they disable text selection on the info view it feels like they’re trying to discourage that.
Basically, I want what you have on Openverse when I tap the information icon.
0 replies
7h17m
Yes. Not giving source information makes it pretty much unusable in my opinion. Even if artists are long dead they should be credited for their works.
4 replies
13h48m
The hard thing with this kind of search engine is that if it gets it wrong, the user is the one who takes on the liability.
I would pay a license fee and so would a lot of smaller sites if you had insurance and indemnification if they got sued.
However much I dislike Unsplash, and that's quite a bit, I do think there's a interesting benefit to their paid offer where if you use an unsplash image and it turns out that actually copyrighted (e.g. someone who is not the photographer who uploads the image and then the photographer sues you for using the image), Getty will defend you / pay your legal fees.
Right now I'm very particular about using things labeled out of copyright or uncopyrighted. Even things that are in the Flickr Commons or on NASA's site can be suspect.
For instance I just ran across a company logo uploaded by the San Diego aviation museum that's listed as out of copyright in Flickr Commons, but I strongly suspect it's still copyrighted. On NASA's site, I've seen images attributed to SpaceX and don't trust them at all not to sue.
Given that the penalty for being wrong on copyright can be insanely high even if you have the best intentions, I would really like a source that I could trust and would pay to be indemnified.
2 replies
12h27m
I ran into this recently. I was looking for a image of clown fish on Flickr with their license based search. I found a great one. I downloaded it and then started making the attribution where on I clicked through to the link of the photographer, or rather the their flickr account. It was immediately super clear it was a fake account with a few 1000 stolen images since there was just too much work and too much diversity in the images. I reverse searched for a few and found some of them on flickr and posted much further in the past and they were "all rights reserved"
1 replies
2h15m
Flickr is one of the better websites for this. I've seen a few websites with CC work where uploaders barely had any profile information. A simple "I take all the photos I upload and I know what CC means" would suffice. Ironically, the one that felt the "safest" was someone who linked to their Instagram where they posted photos. Instagram doesn't provide CC info, so this person went through the effort of creating an account in a different website just to reupload their photos that are CC.
I was making some photo editing tutorials and I ran into a similar problem. I needed a photo of a person. Turns out photos of people have their own additional set of legal problems (right to one's own image). This made me very worried because surely all these photographers who are marking their photos as CC have the consent of the models, right? Otherwise nobody would be able to use the CC photos. What would be the point of a photo being CC if it was illegal to copy it anyway? I think some website had a license that said I couldn't portray the person in the photo in bad light, or something of sort, which was particularly problematic for me since I was looking for a photo of someone sufficiently ugly to make a tutorial about skin retouching.
0 replies
30m
There are people who do deliberately publish images of themselves under a permissive licence. Sometimes seen with photos for specific topics on Wikipedia (published on Wikimedia Commons). I can only guess at their motivations, but there seem to be a good deal of exhibitionists and copyleft idealists in that group.
If a photo is used on Wikipedia with the licence you need, there is a solid chance the vetting process was done thoroughly enough. For photos of a person this would the first place to look for me.
0 replies
8h13m
Getty will defend you / pay your legal fees.
No, they won't. They will only give you up to $10k per image and it only applies to images specifically marked as Unsplash+, not all Unsplash images.
And any kind of legal costs incurred prior to contacting them will also not be covered.
3 replies
16h24m
why won't it let me zoom in more?
2 replies
12h23m
Or download on mobile
1 replies
6h52m
You can?
0 replies
2m
Are you asking or telling?
2 replies
18h37m
It looks neat. I love the blurry background on the interface elements. Does it include images from Wikimedia Commons?
I searched for a known Wikipedia photo I had upl myself (“urinal”) but it didn’t show up on your search engine.
1 replies
17h14m
Aren't Wikimedia images under the CC, not public domain?
0 replies
16h7m
No, the uploader of each image can decide on any free license they want, and some people choose public domain.
1 replies
18h41m
Related: CanWeImage[1].
0 replies
18h27m
NASA images was the first thing I thought of when I thought of public domain images. Looks like public.work doesn't include NASA images but this website does.
0 replies
12h19m
Cool, it's pretty fast.
0 replies
9h23m
Nice
0 replies
6h53m
Infinite scrolling makes it extremely annoying to use. Also very limited search results. I searched for "London" and got nothing modern enough to use, or nothing that even resembles London remotely. Are there really no images of London in the public domain or just that they aren't either being tagged and hence not indexed or maybe both?
0 replies
12h1m
Every image is downloaded as a file named "downloaded_image.jpeg". Would be better if the files were named as the title of the work.
0 replies
4h0m
Interesting! I often use public-domain etchings or wood carvings in my presentation and find them by searching
"angry man site:gutenberg.org"
or
"angry man site:oldbookillustrations.com"
in Brave Search.
It works pretty reliably, but I've been meaning to make a semantic search, because I often have to mess around with the keywords to get results for some more abstract ideas.
Feedback for this site:
- FYI when a search result returns few results, the images repeat in the infini-scroll. This makes it marginally more difficult to evaluate each image, especially not knowing the exact number of hits w/o counting the number of images that haven't repeated.
- I may be wrong but it feels like there are a lot fewer images here than there can be.
- As other have pointed out, while attribution isn't leagally required for PD images, it's extremely important for many potential users as it allows them to validate the license claim you are making.
0 replies
48m
Hmmm... this is trash. All images are called 'downloaded_image.jpeg' which is hilarious.
Who created the image? When? Where? How can I find more from the same book, or by the same artist?
Cultural amnesia is one thing, but annihilating the credits and context deliberately is very bad indeed.
Pinterest does this evil trick, and Cosmos bills itself as 'Pinterest for creatives' = pure internet cancer.
0 replies
12h18m
It does have really dumb UI, the image results are looks like part of the page background, and then there's the two direction infinite scroll!
0 replies
5h40m
This has potential to be an amazing resource. Not sold on the infinite scroll that goes in any direction as a useful interface for browsing the images. As other commenters have noted, metadata such as source information would also be useful and should be included
0 replies
17h16m
The mural of search results is cool but I keep getting lost and can’t find my way back to the earlier results
0 replies
17h14m
The infinite scrolling of the same images over and over again makes it harder to use. You can’t tell how many results you’ve actually received and what they are.
0 replies
1h50m
Engineering: Enable zooming. At certain threshold, the highest available resolution shoukd be downloaded & displayed, while further away you can even use pre-gen thumbnails. This would enchance usability.
0 replies
14h58m
A simple thing people want, but apparently it’s harder than you think to get working
Which one of those is 'public domain'?
One is a license for all commercial use. Creative Commons is more restrictive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license.
Public domain gets assigned automatically when some time has passed or by the author releasing it into the public domain under the cc zero license. Unsplash started like that. There are potential issues like uncertainty about signed model release documents when people are the main part of the picture plus trademarks prominently appearing.
it’s complicated
Just realized I did not really answer the question.
While that's useful, CC images and public domain image search results are pretty meaningfully different.
There are a number of different CC-licenses which impose different restrictions on how a work can be used so filtering by just "Creative Commons licenses" is not very helpful. Openverse[1] provides filtering by specific CC licenses, and also for finding public domain images specifically. Disclosure: I am a maintainer for Openverse.
[1]: https://openverse.org
I just tested Kagi and DuckDuckGo, both can also filter image results on license type.
Does it allow filtering Creative Commons version 4 only or all CC licenses jumbled?
Mess up attribution and in pre-v4 CC license it reverts back to All Rights Reserved.
This is the business model for some folks. 500 - 5000usd demand per infringement is a nasty surprise.
Here's one such case and company. https://petapixel.com/2022/06/01/copyright-trolls-are-suing-...