I was looking at one site for lower cost royalty free images when I noticed in their license explanation that some of the photographers wanted credits in work that the images were used in. That’s when I went to their Contact page to inform them that it wasn’t very useful for design if you have to give a credit. They mailed back and said only if you can. But you know what I’m not even going to mess around with something like “we want you to do this but only if you can”. I want to know if I use an image that the usage is free and clear and there’s NOTHING to worry about.

As far as blogging and the web I always am second guessing what I do because I never want to do wrong by anyone. I think as others have said if you are promoting someones site and giving credit and a link that they most likely are going to be happy about it.

I recently went to a job interview where they were questioning EVERYTHING I did! “Did you take this photo?” “Did you write this copy?” “Was this piece really for that company?” As a recent grad, I don’t have too much professional work, so many of the pieces in my portfolio are “personal projects,” and I have only used one photo that wasn’t my own, which got me thinking about using stock photography/illustrations. Anyway, thanks again for participating everyone!

I’m also with Dawud in that I generally include a link to myself in the footer of a client site, but they are never required to leave it there. They paid for the design so really it becomes theirs.

As for celebrity photos or screen shots, the U.S. has what’s called Fair Use. Basically it allows for use of a copyrighted work for certain circumstances such as parodies, criticism or reference. I think most countries have some form of this law, and screen shots would surely fall under it and would not require permission or credit. Not sure about the celebrity photos… it’s a very subjective law.

I really like what Aaron had to say in that the only person who needs credit is the client. The reason any of us – graphics designers, photographers, web designers, etc – want credit is for our self-promotion. There’s really no other reason for it. Do you think the client’s customers really care who took that photo or who designed the website? Not really. Not unless they’re in the market for a service themselves.

I feel that once the project is paid for, the client owns it. Now, it’s up to them to decide what promotion they want to do on their sites.

Yet, do I put credit and links at the bottom of the websites I design. You betcha. As long as the client doesn’t mind (and they usually don’t), I get a little promotion. But truly it’s up to them.

On rights-managed images…I don’t use ‘em. Way too many hoops to jump through. I use royalty-free images a lot. And I know that the photographer has decided to offer the image that way so he/she knows that they’re not going to get credited. Isn’t that sort of an unspoken truth about royalty-free images?

If you think about it for a minute, social media in general is changing the way we think of images. With Flickr and blogging, how we use images is changing. Things are much more open today. And, there’s so many bloggers using images wherever then find them it’s going to be hard to police any sort of restrictions.

I like things being open and without restrictions – as long as the artist gets paid or opts to give their images away freely.

I was reading somewhere recently (although can’t for a life of me remember where) how pointless these credits are and very soon they could be done away with – certainly on television. Because a) no-one reads them, and b) if you did want to read them wouldn’t it make sense to have them online somewhere so at the end of each program/film you just get a web URL rather than 30 seconds to 2 minutes of wasted air time?