Tom’s Two Cents

Recently, I wrote a post called Letting your Flickr photos wander. Someone saw this post on reddit and asked me if I had a trick to detecting when people reuse my photos on Flickr. The truth is that many people are good enough to send me a note on Flickr to let me know they used my photo. I also set up a Google alert for my flickr username: caswell_tom. That way if someone gives me attribution I get an alert. Here is another case of reuse I found via a Google alert. I’m not a pro, but it’s always fun to see where my photos end up.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Flickr lately. I like seeing the different ways my photos get reused. From Wikipedia to Schmap.com to an online women’s magazine. Just for fun, I have added a “reused” tag to each of the photos I know has been reused somewhere. Here’s what I have so far: http://flickr.com/photos/caswell_tom/tags/reused/

This is all just anecdotal, but it seems people really started reusing my photos around the same time I changed all 1500+ of them over to an Attribution-only Creative Commons license. It could be that more and more Flickr users are enjoying the same kind of content reuse fame and glory regardless of what license they choose. But I think it has something to do with my willingness to open up my CC license by only asking for attribution without adding a bunch of other conditions that make reusers nervous. The truth is I really don’t care if people use my photos commercially. In fact, I think it’s kind of neat to see what happens with them. In a way they take on a life of their own. And you never know where they will end up.