Re: [Gimp-developer] stock images [was: Re: urgent]

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Tue, 2014-06-10 at 22:10 -0500, Chris Mohler wrote:

> This one is legit: http://www.freeimages.com/ ( formerly http://sxc.hu
> and recently purchased by Getty )
>
> Some of the photos do have restrictions (eg, 'Author must be notified
> if the image is used in a public work' ), but the majority are free as
> in beer and speech.

Well, you have t be careful even with sxc.hu/freeimage, or any site with
user-supplied content such as deviantart.com, and the difficulty is that
if someone uploads an image that isn't theirs, you may end up being
liable, or having to take down your image. I've even sent a takedown
request myself once, when someone used one of my pictures to
promote/endorse a service that I despise, without paying and without
credit and without permission.

I agree there's a lot of good stock there, but you still have to be
careful and do due diligence, especially for commercial work. The terms
of service says:
[[
Freeimages cannot be held responsible for any copyright violations, and
cannot guarantee the legality of the Images stored in its system. If you
want to make sure, always contact the photographers. You use the site
and the photos at your own risk!
]] http://www.freeimages.com/help/7_2

The US government NOAA site has a lot of images (mostly wildlife and
nature) that are free and for sure unencumbered.

I'm not really trying to scare people :-) so much as that for something
like a catalogue business (mentioned by Anne) it can work out much
cheaper to use paid images where someone else guarantees the licensing.
It can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours of work to
check up on an image; I do it for the images I sell because I usually
only have to do it once for a whole book, although even there I
sometimes mark images as non-commercial use only because there's some
doubt. In one case I'd love to get permission to use some images but the
artist's niece is the sole survivor of the family and the publisher of
the book relied to my letter to say they aren't sure where she lives,
they think in a nursing home...

Best,

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml