Finding images and giving proper credit

January 5th, 2010 by David Phillips

When I was a programmer, there was always new software coming my way. I always had access to the latest and greatest tools. Often, friends would want to borrow the discs and license and install that software on their computers. I admit to doing that when I was younger, but when you start producing software yourself, you want to your due for all your hard work. You may be willing to give away copies, but you know what it took to create that software. I didn’t give in to the request to let others borrow the software very often.

On the disturbing things I found, and still run across today, is that before Microsoft put into place their activation codes, churches would buy one copy of software and install it on every computer. My wife was on staff at a church and they blatantly did that. The pastor didn’t like me for pressing the issue and he never bought the appropriate licenses and kept all the computers from being upgraded so they didn’t have to get the appropriate licenses. I almost turned them in to the software piracy group.

Now as a blogger I try to find images that complement my posts. In the past I would go to one of two places for images: sxc.hu or google images. sxc.hu is a free stock photo site and google images searches for images all over the web. The negative thing about google images is that you never know where those images come from. Some of them are digital images of paintings that have a copyright, some are photographs that are copyrighted, etc. I would often feel a little guilty for using some images on my blog because I never knew if I was stealing or pirating content that someone felt they should get paid for.

New image search

Sprixi
Along comes a new image search engine called Sprixi. Sprixi is owned by Thirsty Minds Pty Ltd, an Australian company. The inspiration for the name “Sprixi” came from the words “picture” and “wiki” according to their FAQ’s.

Sprixi helps you choose and use an image fast. To get started enter a word or two that best describes the image you’re looking for. Click search. Browse the images shown and choose an image you want. You can scroll down to see more images. Use the image by downloading it or copy the link to it.

For most images you will need to give credit to the author. Sprixi can do this automatically for you if the image is large enough, otherwise you will need to copy the credit and paste it where you are using the image. It actually puts the proper credit at the very bottom of the image. Sprixi is “purpose built” to help you choose and use an image quickly and easily. Sprixi is not about tagging or commenting on images, and it is not about browsing a million photos. Sprixi is about finding an image that is useful to you. Sprixi tries to sort images by usefulness – how useful you find an image for that topic.
Images are sorted automatically just by people using Sprixi. Images you click on, rate, use, download or upload are given a usefulness rating. You can also vote for the usefulness of images by clicking on the yes, maybe and no buttons. Votes from registered users are given a heavier weighting.
For new topics, all images are unsorted. Over time, more useful images will work their way to the top.

Currently Sprixi searches Flickr, OpenClipArt.org and the images you upload to Sprixi. Sprixi tries to only show public domain and commercial-friendly Creative Commons licences.

If you are looking for images for your blog, a presentation, and book or any other creative endeavor, let me suggest that you try Sprixi first and give credit where credit is due.

Tags: Images, Technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 8:09 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.