Great images are a proven strategy for increasing engagement online. You can use images to increase engagement on Twitter, in your Facebook feed and even on sales pages. The problem with great images though is that it takes time to take beautiful photos. Even if you have a big database of your own photos, you might find that you don’t have the right photo for your marketing needs.
This is when things can get complicated. You might find that you need to use other people’s photos. Now this shouldn’t be a problem, but it can be. There are a lot of different types of image licences in use and they mean different things.
To save you future problems from using an image with the wrong kind of licence we’ve created this helpful article that talks you through each of the seven types of licence used under Creative Commons. Then I’ll share with you a simple solution that will help you avoid any future problems.
1. Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication
This is the best kind of licence for most people. The image can be edited in any way you want. You can use it for commercial purposes and you do not need to give an attribution saying where you got the photo.
2. Attribution – CC BY
With this license, you are free to share and edit photos. You can use them for any purpose, even commercial. However, if you do use the photo you need to attribute it to the author. This means you need to give appropriate credit (provide a link to where you found thw photo). You will also need to state if any changes were made.
3. Attribution-ShareAlike – CC BY-SA
If you found a work with this license (btw, Wikipedia uses this license), it means that you are free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format ) and adapt (remix it and transform it) for any purposes, even commercial. Besides the attribution term, this also have a ShareAlike term, which means whatever you create can be used by somebody else under the same terms.
4. Attribution-NoDerivs – CC BY-ND
This license means you are free to share an image for any purpose, even commercial. You can’t change or edit the image though. Finally, you will need to give attribution/appropriate credit to the person who took the photo.
5. Attribution-NonCommercial – CC BY-NC
This form of license is very similar to the Attribution license. The big difference though is that you are not allowed to use the material for commercial purposes. That means personal only.
6. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike – CC BY-NC-SA
The Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license is similar to the Attribution-ShareAlike license. However, you may not use the material for commercial purposes.
7. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs – CC BY-NC-ND
With this license, you can share (copy and redistribute) the material in any format or media. You need to give credit to the person who took the photo, you can’t use the photo for commercial purposes and you can’t edit the photo.
So these are the seven Creative Common licenses used on the internet. To help you avoid problems we created a great plugin called Image Suite that lets you search the Internet from within your WordPress dashboard for copyright free images. You can even edit them using Pixlr from within the dashboard.
To find out more about this great plugin, click on the following link. It’s going to help you save time and money by getting you the images you want for your marketing needs.
By the way, do you ever encounter any copyrights problems? How did you solve your problems?
P.S. If you want to try Youzign for yourself then head over to the homepage for your free 30-day trial. You don’t need to enter your credit card details. To get started just click here.
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