Making Creative Commons Easier: Greasemonkey and Flickr Creative Commons Images

Update! The script is now working again thanks to the incredibly fast work of Alan Levine – thanks so much!

PLEASE NOTE!!

Yesterday Flickr changed their entire layout, and as a result this script does not work in Flickr’s current form. Alan Levine has told me that he needs to change this script again for this to work – I’ll keep you posted on progress…this article comments on the constantly changing nature of Web2.0.

Flickr has a huge collection of images which users have uploaded and shared under Creative Commons Licences. This means that the owners of the images have licenced the images to allow others to use them, as long as they follow the conditions of the licence. If you have never heard of Creative Commons, you can learn more about it here on our Copyright Copyleft wiki.

The easiest Creative Commons Licence to work with is Attribution,  which means that the image can be replicated, republished or remixed in any way, as long as the original creator is attributed as such. The Attribution licence looks like this:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

There are thousands of gorgeous images available on Flickr under this licence, and attributing images is fairly simple; Creative Commons explains the process in detail on their website.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by steren.giannini

Although the process is simple, in practise it requires quite a bit of flicking from one screen to another, copying and pasting information. Alan Levine, known for his CogDogBlog decided to do something about this – and created an amazing little Greasemonkey script that places all of the information you need to correctly attribute an image on the actual image page on Flickr – pretty cool, huh?

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make changes to web page content.

Greasemonkey can be used for customizing page appearance, adding new functions to web pages (for example, embedding price comparisons within shopping sites), and numerous other purposes. In this case, we will be using a Greasemonkey script to alter the appearance of Flickr pages, so that the attribution information is available for each image.

Please note that this solution works most easily on the Firefox web browser. If you cannot use Firefox, it is possible to achieve similar results in other browsers, although the process is more complicated. For more information on this check out this PC World article.

A second caveat: if you try the process below on a school computer and it does not work, it may be that certain security settings have been established to block scripts from running. While some scripts are malicious, this script is not. Talk to your IT tech about making changes to allow this script to run. I have never run into this issue, however it may come up as each school sets up their security differently.

Below is a step by step process for installing Greasemonkey and the Flickr Creative Commons script onto your computer, for quick and easy Creative Commons attribution! Although the process seems long, you only need to do this once and it should continue to work forever. I’ve included the process as pdf to download, so that you can share it with others.

Download the PDF here

Once you’ve installed this script, each Flickr image page should have the following information available, ready for for you to either embed onto a web page, or to copy and paste wherever you use the image!

This is a closer look. These handy little windows of information will save you loads of time!