How To Credit Photos? | 3 Different Methods To Credit Images

With the help of technology, one can earn money from blogging and content writing and openly share their experience and knowledge with others. To make the content attractive, images and videos are uploaded. It is not possible all the time to do every work by ourselves.

One has to use others’ work, like images, videos, and materials. Our work is regarded as illegal when we do not take permission for copyrighted work. The owner has a right to file a lawsuit under copyright infringement law. The question arises, how to credit photos?

See also: Best Online Fax Services That Are Cheap

What Is Copyright?

The US government introduced the copyright infringement law under which the owner possesses some rights over his work and can take legal action against the person who exploits his work. The owner owns the copyright on his profession when registering his work in the copyright registration office.

It protects the identity of the owner and his contribution. Some examples of copyright work are creating books, e-books, materials, documents, movies, images, videos, songs, etc. These are one form of expression of ideas on the internet.

With the copyright, owners can recreate multiple versions of their work, distribute copies of work to make money, get recognition, and even sell the work to other parties. However, there are ways to use copyright work by giving Copyright credit to the owner of the work.

A copyright credit is a process of using someone’s work legally and ethically. In this process, the person who wants to use the copyrighted work needs to take permission from the owner and then use it in his work to avoid a lawsuit.

Before using his work, sign a written agreement with the owner. How to credit an image? For instance, if you want to use a copyrighted image, you need to give a copyright credit by inserting © (Copyright symbol) after the image and the author’s name or a link to the source. 

See also: 9 Smart Ways to Pay Off Debt Fast This Year

Copyright Registration

The owner can avail of all the benefits of copyright only when his work is in the records of the copyright register. The owner gets some legal rights over his work and can protect his work from getting pirated. Though copyright registration does not guarantee work piracy, the owner can take action and get compensation.

To register their original art, the owner has to fill out a copyright form that includes all the profession’s details and purpose. He needs to pay an amount of money and submit the form along with copies of proof. Copyright work gets expires after 70 years from the date of its registration.

Benefits of copyright registration

• Copyright work ensures work security from illegal use under copyright infringement law.
• The losses that occur due to piracy diminish.
• The owner can earn money from his work by distributing his copies of work to different parties.
• They can get a name and fame when they get compensation.

Copyright Infringement

One must owe credit to the source or could be held responsible for copyright violations under copyright law if someone publishes photographs or other images when he does not possess the right to do so. If you do not find a fair-use or public domain image, getting permission from the copyright owner is necessary.

How to credit images? A photograph can be in the public domain, but its subjects can be copyrighted, like well-known works of art, marked products, or renowned people. In this case, the copyright holder must also give permission.

For the more significant benefit, fair use is in place to allow copyrighted works by the public without permission from the author. Fair-use pictures are images that can be adopted and published by users. A digital picture is used as long as specific guidance is complied with. These guidelines typically contain certain education, research, and personal use stipulations.

Some of the ways to get the copyright symbol are:

• In windows, press “Alt +0169” to get the copyright symbol, 
• Go to the Insert tab and find various symbols in the symbols tab. Click on the copyright symbol.  
• Mac users can press “Option +G” to get a copyright symbol.

See also: 7 Best Credit Cards for College Students in 2023

How To Credit Photos?

Given below are the ways how to credit photos:

The Most Commonly Used Credit Method (TANS)

This is the most predominantly used method to credit photos.

Title

Title of the picture. In some cases, it is not mentioned. Then no need to worry about it.

Author

It denotes the name of the creator who owns the Copyright. Better link back to the creator website.

Source

Mention the source location from Where you get the image. The source is the artist/photographer or the publication/site for which the model is present. Sources do not include Google Image Search, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest, or a particular blog. It is generally a URL and hyperlink of the source where we found the image credit.

License

Mention the version of the License. License type specifies how you can use the image. 

Public Domain Images

Next on the list of how to credit photos are to use public domain images. To avoid the Copywrite issue, you can use a public domain with no copyrights. It means that any work put under it can be used freely by anyone and for any purpose without being restricted by copyright restrictions.

Public domain is not applied when the creator of a work has retained the residual right. Today many fantastic websites on the Internet offer thousands of free public domain photographs free of royalties. So, this is how to credit a photo.

Unsplash

This site reserves the license to allow its users to use images.

This further showcases the graphic design work of other users.

Visit: Unsplash

Pexels

It is an authorized site that allows its users to download and modify the images as per their requirements.

Visit: Pexels

Pixabay

This is an authorized site under Creative Common Zero (CCO).

Users can use this site’s images without permission or giving any credit to the owner.

Visit: Pixabay

Canva

It is a graphic designing toolkit.

It provides free images and allows users to convert the images into custom graphics.

Visit: Canva

Burst

It is a free stock of images platform by Shopify. It has both free and royalty-free images.

Purchasing images once from the owner to use multiple times are royalty-free images.

Visit: Burst

Creative Commons Images

How to credit photos? Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that creates and distributes general licenses. It allows creators to share/distribute their work for others’ use under some restrictions. It manages six different licenses. So this is how to give photo credit.

CC BY 

Its License allows others to share, recreate, tweak and develop on creator work, even commercially, as long as they give credit to the original creator for their original creation.

This License is the most supportive License by creative commons.

CC BY-SA (Share-Alike)

The License lets you change, build, and remix the person’s work to create a new version. Unless they share any new creations under the same terms, Wikipedia uses this License. Open-source projects often use it.

CC BY-ND (NoDerivs)

This License allows others to reuse the work for any reason, including commercial and non-commercial. You must give credit to the creator. If others want to modify the creator’s work, they must get permission from the original creator.

CC BY-NC-SA (Non-Commercial, Share-Alike)

This License allows others to reuse, modify/finetune practices for non-commercial use (non-profitable from creator work). You must credit the original creator and give your version of their work the same License. 

CC BY-NC (Non-Commercial)

This License allows anyone to use, change and finetune works for non-commercial purposes. If credit is given to the original creator. The original author is credited for all new works that use some original ones. They do not have to license their latest works to the same conditions.

CC BY-NC-ND

This License is the most stringent of six main licenses in creative commons, only allowing others to download original creator works and share them with others as long as they credit the creator, but they can’t change them in any way. It should not use for any commercial purpose.

See also: 29+1 Best Online Data Entry Jobs from Home

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you give credit to a photo?

The most common way of giving credit to a photo is to mention the title of the picture, the author, that is, the creator of the picture, its source, and also mention the version of the license.

How can I use copyrighted images on my blog?

To use copyrighted images on your blog, the simplest way is to take permission from the owner of the image.

What photos can I use legally?

To avoid copyright issues, one can use public domain images since these images are free for anyone to use. Various websites like Unsplash, Pexels, Canva, Pixabay, and Burst offer thousands of Public Domain photographs. You can also use Creative Commons images, which distribute general licenses allowing you to use their images under some restrictions.

Conclusion

Even Google made it easy to search images set under different categories like reuse images, not licensed images, commercial use, adaptable images, etc. These tools and techniques protect the owners and users from legal lawsuits. The online resources listed above give public domain image access to bloggers and writers and make their content free from piracy. Hope this article answers your question on how to credit photos.

See also: How To Sell Your Photos Online (Sell Stock Photos For Money)