> Sometimes a photo is not enough, so create videos if you want to demonstrate interaction.
Why not create FLV files? Riva Encoder is pretty good (as long as you stick with a 4:3 resolution).

Hi Philipp,

great Post, i have a question though. You write:

<blockquote>Use Flickr’s Creative Commons search to find photos. You can then include these photos in your blog, and mention the Creative Commons license as well as the original photographer to give proper credit. (If you have a Creative Commons license for your blog as well, you can additionally use photos with a share-alike license, so it’s a good idea to add CC to your blog.) Wikipedia lists some other free-to-share images resources.</blockquote>

Doy you include the photographers name in the description or does it have to be as text written below the picture?

How doy you give your blog a Creative Common License, by dropping a line below every article or by mentioning it in the sidebar? Do you have an example where a blog has done it well?

Thanks for your help and your great blog! Andre

14 Don’t hotlink images from other servers. If you’re a developer, this one is probably obvious to you: including image URLs that point to another server (I’m talking about a server with which you don’t have some kind of membership relation) puts your site at great risk. Not only may you annoy another webmaster, and not only may the image you’re linking to be removed... what’s worse is that someone now has “power” over your blog and can replace their image with e.g. a shocking image that will suddenly display on your frontpage.

And what is even worse and ought to be obvious is that it is a copyright violation and that unless you have a license from the copyright holder you can neither hotlink nor copy the image . In the US there are certain very narrowly defined circumstances, such as "fair use" or "public domain" uses which are allowed. But aside from that, an image on another site is copyright. Ask permission.

Does anyone here know when exactly using a picture might be considered fair use ? In my particular case I am interested in writing about science papers that include pictures. To explain what the authors did and why it is important, or in some cases, why I might disagree with them, it is very helpful to include a picture from their manuscript. Would this be considered fair use if the manuscript is copyright ?

Heh, hotlinking!

The following page is hotlinking one of my images, and I occasionally rotate the image just for fun. At the moment it's showing an elephant's backside; a few months ago I had the singer Heino showing on that page:
http://www.lagrosseradio.com/mag/index.php/2006/02/17/190-les-mots-clefs-une-guerre-politique-payante

Readers probably think the elephant's backside fits quite nicely with the article!

<< And what is even worse and ought to be obvious is that it is a copyright violation and that unless you have a license from the copyright holder you can neither hotlink nor copy the image . >>

Is that actually true? Is it really illegal to hotlink to copyrighted images? I can understand why it might be illegal to hotlink to copyrighted images and pass them off as your own – but if you just hotlink to an image and say nothing about its origins, how is that illegal? Surely by definition "copyright" has to do with making a copy of some sort. Doesn't it?

> Doy you include the photographers name in
> the description or does it have to be as text
> written below the picture?

The CC license (at least mine, flavors may vary) reads:

<<If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, ...>>

... and so on. Note the text says "reasonable to the medium or means", so you can pretty much do what is fair & makes sense. What I usually do is name the specific owner, link the owner's name to the originating Flickr page or their homepage (as found on the user's Flickr profile), and additionally, link to the CC license (as the CC license reads "For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page"). Note however that owners can further specificy how they'd like to be attributed, and then you have to respect that per the license...

> How doy you give your blog a Creative Common License,
> by dropping a line below every article or by mentioning it
> in the sidebar? Do you have an example where a blog has done
> it well?

Yes, you can add the license anywhere, like the footer or sidebar, and you can also include a CC icon (found at CreativeCommons.org).
Make sure to use the rel="license" attribute on your link to the CC license as this identifies the license for e.g. searchbots. I use the standard CC phrase "some rights reserved" in the footer of this blog. Basically what I do when I want to check whether a blog is CC licensed is that I open the HTML source and then press Ctrl + F to search for "creativec..." or something, as this works for every page.

Congratulations! You were on my daily hot 7 blogspots podcast today! Thanks for the great post!

DailyBlogspots.com

Rick

Important Tip (?):
When uploading JPGs please oh please make them progressive.
Its important to let people know that there is a picture there and let them see what it is while downloading. I know at this age and time bandwidth is so abundant you don't get to see the image before it gets downloaded but every once in a while some poor soul will need to use the internet over a 56k modem so spare them the agony. (My office connection runs at 64kbps so I should know)

> 9. Use the right compression.

Yes, Philipp! For example screenshots are perfect for PNG compression, and you tend to compress them as JPEG. Couple of months ago you recompressed to JPEG before publishing some screenshots I sent you in PNG. And look at this screens from recent articles:

http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-desktop-5-preview.jpg
http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-desktop-5-gadgets.jpg
(you can clearly see compression's effects...)

> people easily remember the photos they’ve
> seen when scrolling down on your frontpage

Yes, thats right, but it's sometimes broken by:

> 7. Use iconic images.

Sometimes I accidentally skip bunch of posts, because you use the same icon two times in the 24 hours and I think that I already read post with this icon, along with posts before it.

... or use the new built-in Picasa Photos :)

> For example screenshots are perfect for
> PNG compression, and you tend to compress them as JPEG.

Ludwik, I respectfully disagree: PNG is not optimal for certain types of screenshots, which I'll call "complex" screenshots (e.g. those including photos, or lots of anti-aliased text). Simply because the file size will be too big. I often save two versions of screenshots (JPEG and PNG) and then compare which is better, and then make a decision based on the specific image. However, I often link the JPEG to a larger image, which is then PNG (because the text is not "anti-aliased" – well, resampled – anymore, it compresses a lot better in large sizes, and it's sometimes even smaller in KB than the low-resolution variant). Admittedly, I don't always take the time to create a zoom version of every image. It depends.

Does anyone knows a simple software to resize and add captions to a picture?

I use PSP4 (PaintShop Pro 4) for very simple or pixel-precise tasks, and Corel PhotoPaint for everything else. I believe a free shareware version of the super-old PSP4 is still floating around the 'net somewhere...

Thank's Phillip... great post!

BTW, it might be worth trying the (free) Paint.NET photo editing software to edit images – http://www.getpaint.net – I've heard good thing about it but not used it myself yet...

Free GIMP is also an alternative, albeit I'm no fan of its usability...

#9 is golden.

This is by far the most important, IMO. I see far too many people taking screenshots and uploading them as JPEGs. The quality sucks! And GIFs have been "out" for a long time, since they have terrible quality and compression. I now use PNG for everything except photographs, which I use JPEG for.

www.openclipart.com is something I will look more into. But if you need cliparts you can subscribe to www.clipart.com. They got lots of cliparts and images and is that too expensive for home use. I use them all the time.

using CC non-commercial on your blog and then gaining revenue from advertising is surely a commercial exploit

>> using CC non-commercial on your blog and then
>> gaining revenue from advertising is surely a commercial exploit

I don't think so. Not if people come to the your blog to read your articles rather than look at the pictures. Sure, the pictures can enhance the articles but do they really make people more likely to view your site or click your ads?

Deg, I once received a reply on this issue at the CC mailing list or from Lawrence Lessig (forgot which). It's not as black-and-white as you may think, but instead, the question is more like "how commercial is it" and "how much money is made directly from the CC content." Similar to the "fair use" concept, this largely depends on the specific context. So it may well be that putting a CC image behind a form that says "pay $10 to receive this image" is not fair, and even putting a gazillion ads around nothing but a CC content is not fair, but that having a couple of ads on the site, and then including CC content, *is* fair. Unfortunately, I seem to have deleted this email conversation, but with the replies I came to the conclusion that e.g. http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-1.html is fair (I'm displaying a CC work and also display ads).

By the way, there's another important aspect to this: what if you make less or equal ad revenues than covers your server costs? In other words, what if the ads just cover for the distribution costs (= bandwidth, in this context)? And what if you *don't know* this in advance, because you don't know the traffic/ ad click ratios you'll be getting?

Speaking for this blog, which is also CC-licensed: when I tick the non-commercial option, I don't expect you to use the posts/ images only on sites with zero ads. I expect you to not take all of the posts, collect them in a book, and then sell the book for $40 as "best of Google Blogoscoped." (Actually, contact me if you like to do this, maybe I am open to this after all :)). To me, the non-commercial clause translates into a general "anti-spam/ anti-rip off/ please handle with respect" option, though it can't be defined with 100% precision.

I think this is a similar "blurred/ common sense" thing as the "non-derivatives" option (which in my understanding of the legalese does allow for cropping and resizing of CC images, because "derivative" in US law is not defined as just *any* alteration, but only certain types of alterations).

Great article.

Png really good. It can keep color and have the small size like Gif for line and square in some pure color images.

For photoes, JPG at 65% rates from ACDSEE can have the small size and good looking.

And I add a one, sometimes SWF is small and no matter how big you set, it can keep clear.

Check out Divshare uploader:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/02/27/roundup-timebridge-yatam-dekoh-pickle-divshare-uploader-lifetrackers/

Upload images from within a blog post, then get it sent to your Divshare file host.

Kudos! I wish more blog authors would read this post.

I love images in blog posts. I use at least one image in each post ... most of the time. Thanks for the tips. I like the one about the zoomed in thumbnail image of the real thing.

Best,
Marek

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