Commons:Flickr images
From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository
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Only Flickr images tagged as  (CC-BY) or  (CC-BY-SA) are allowed on Commons. If in doubt, please use the Flinfo tool or ask on the talk page.Some more advanced information can be found at Commons:Flickr images/Guide. |
Flickr (link) allows free hosting of imagery under a variety of licenses, some free and some non-free. Flickr allows its users to select the license of their choice and to change it at any time, without any logs of the prior copyright status of the image. This means there is no easy way to check whether an image currently marked as non-free was uploaded under a free license. This causes problems for the use of these images on Wikimedia projects.
Commons has two systems for verifying the copyright status of images from Flickr:
- The FlickrLickr system is a collaborative bot that allows users to select images on Flickr for upload to Commons. The bot only allows free images to be uploaded, ensuring their correct licensing.
- There is also a review process, which allows for the verification of freely licensed images by a bot or trusted user (admins and community approved users) and identification of images where the Commons license is different. This method cannot tell if the image was ever freely available.
These projects have different but convergent goals. FlickrLickr aims to find free content on Flickr for Wikimedia, and Flickr review aims to verify the free status of Flickr images uploaded to Commons.
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[edit] Flickr review
As a result of Flickr review, by bot and by human, hundreds of images have been identified as possibly unfree. In the past, when Flickr images have been nominated for deletion, there was generally no consensus about whether to delete these images. Factors such as value of the image, how trustworthy the uploader is and the time gap between upload and discovery of the possibly unfree status are all relevant to a decision on what to do with these images.
[edit] Becoming a trusted user
A user who is not an admin can request permission from the community to review images at Commons talk:Flickr images/reviewers. The community has seven days to raise any objection to the review permission.
Reviewers who regularly erroneously tag images may have their permission revoked on this subpage.
[edit] Questionable Flickr images
Some Flickr users may upload images they don't have the rights to, then license those images as free. Commons:Questionable Flickr images lists Flickr users and discussions where we have concluded that certain images marked as freely licensed on Flickr are too questionably licensed for Wikimedia Commons.
[edit] Guidelines
- Users are encouraged to use the FlickrLickr project to upload images from Flickr.
- These images are to be considered free, irrespective of the current license on Flickr.
- Images not uploaded by FlickrLickr should be tagged with {{flickrreview}} for review by bot or trusted user.
- Images verified as freely available should be considered free, even if the license on Flickr changes.
- Images which are no longer freely available at time of review should be marked as possibly unfree pending a decision on what to do with them on Commons talk:Flickr images.
[edit] Static links
One problem when checking licenses of images coming from Flickr is some users provide the static link to the image on Flickr, instead of the description page showing the license. That makes the verification very difficult because you have to search Flickr images hoping you'll find the good tag that will lead you to the good image.
Here is an easy way to find the description page from a static link. Extract the image ID from the static URL and append it to http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=. For instance, the description page of http://farm1.static.flickr.com/153/357298706_b406a56e06.jpg is available at http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=357298706.
[edit] Manual
[edit] The Commons on Flickr
The Commons on Flickr hosts a number of files from various institutions that state that they have “No known copyright restrictions”.
What this means for Wikimedia Commons is unclear, and beware that some institutions (such as the Smithsonian Institute’s Right Statement) flatly contradict “No known copyright restrictions”, asserting copyright and “No commercial use”. One must thus be cautious about uploading such images to Wikimedia Commons.
See: {{Flickr-no known copyright restrictions}} and mail on commons-l, with discussion by George Oates, Flickr employee heading The Commons, expressing some reservations (The Commons on Flickr announcement).
[edit] Searching Flickr
A great way of finding images on Flickr that can be uploaded to Commons is by using the search tools at Flickr. You can search images that are licensed by-2.0 or by-sa-2.0.
[edit] Changing licenses
However, because licenses are not set in stone, asking the uploader to change the license is a possibility. Often there will be no appropriately licensed Creative Commons images, or no Creative Commons images at all. If this is the case, you may decide to politely ask those who have uploaded an image if they would be prepared to release rights to it. If doing this, be specific in your request: the picture must be licensed with CC-BY (attribution) or CC-BY-SA (attribution and ShareAlike). Permission granted without the license on the image page being changed is undesirable, especially in cases where permission is granted via a private message, which is unverifiable.
[edit] Uploading images
[edit] Guidelines
When you're uploading images from Flickr, please:
- upload the largest version of the image, and
- use the Flinfo tool for providing an already filled out version of Template:Information for a picture at Flickr identified by its id.
[edit] Tools
The following tools can assist:
- Upload work from Flickr
- This requires downloading the image to your computer and then uploading it; consider instead these direct tools:
- Bryan's upload tool page,
- Magnus' upload tool page, or
- the FlickrLickr system
