I always provide links back to the source as attribution for the flickr creative commons photos I use. Today I ran into the not so surprising case of wondering what to do, and what the ramifications for, if the original is no longer there?

Here’s the case. A dark night in a web that knows how to keep its secrets, but one dog is still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions. Me.

Oops, wrong story.

I was working on a site which has a banner collage made of 5 or 6 flickr cc licensed images. When I did the original, I downloaded them in 500px size (I keep the original cryptic file names, like “196478990_e68fe3c25a.jpg”). I also, and I wish I could say always, kept a text file with the credits info.

In making a credits page on the new site, I reached for my favorite tool, yep, the one I did myself, the Flickr CC Attribution Helper for Greasemonkey – a Firefox script that nicely inserts two kinds of copiable attribution strings right in the flickr page (only if it is cc licensed):

Now frankly I think this is best thing since

cc licensed flickr photo shared by mattburns.co.uk

Look! I just used it! Again.

I digress.

So I was going to use this as my usual way of attribution for flickr cc content.

Except, one photo came up with the message at the top; I guess the owner of the flickr account skipped town and closed down the account. Or make up any other story. Got hit by a meteorite. Killed their account in protest of not getting enough attribution (I was late again!).

But I got thinking, what happens then to the right to use it if the original is gone? And what would I link to as attribution?

I tweeted before really thinking…

Plenty of people reminded me that it was there in the license (doh) the legal-verbiage-I-click-without-reading, section “7b Termination”

Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above.

So once something is released into Creative Commons, it is there forever under the terms you originally got it, even if the original goes away, or the owner changes their mind. The only “termination” is if the user (me) does something to breach the terms of the license, like using something commercially when it is NC (??) or making jokes about lawyers.

Or even more clearly, in the Creative commons FAQ:

What if I change my mind?
Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license. You can stop distributing your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish; but this will not withdraw any copies of your work that already exist under a Creative Commons license from circulation, be they verbatim copies, copies included in collective works and/or adaptations of your work. So you need to think carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make sure that you are happy for people to be using your work consistent with the terms of the license, even if you later stop distributing your work.

,

And an even bigger “doh” for me because I can still provide attribution by photo credit (in text) without doing a link back. I am so hunk up on links and linktribution that anything else feels weak.

So my original record keeping works, in those days, before my cool as bread Greasemonkey script, I would keep text file logs (which was tedious, about a 4 trip copy/paste routine from web page to text file)

2572694217_200b3646af.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/19353461@N04/2572694217/
scimanal

Where the first line is the file name I saved it, the second the link, and the third the flickr owner’s name.

So thanks “scimanal” for the photo, where-ever you are.

On a related front, as a number of people are hopping off of Firefox for Chrome, I’ll have to bone up on Chrome’s extensions. But, a neat discovery I found was a way to enable Greasemonkey Scripts in Safari- an opensource thing called Greasekit. It’s pretty easy, you first download a thingie called SIMBL.

You gotta love the geek cred behind this description:

Problem:
Some applications do about 90% of what I want.

Solution:
Develop my own applications.

Better Solution:
Patch the application myself…

SIMBL (SIMple Bundle Loader) – pronounced like “symbol” or “cymbal” – enables hacks and plugins. For instance, SIMBL enables PithHelmet to enhance Safari.

Wow, I am glad to have my PithHelmet!

Please ignore the diversion. Install SIMBL, its a small app that goes somewhere deep in the bowls of the computer. The download GreaseKit, more or less a small plug-in file that you bury about 7 folders deep in your home directory.

The next time you launch Safari, you have a Greasekit menu, where you can add Greasemonkey Scripts. I;ve not tried too many (well just mine, and it works):

Keep those attributions a goin’ Link if you can!

Mmm, sliced bread!

So far maybe 140 people have installed my Flickr Creative Commons Attribution Helper- a GreaseMonkey script for Firefox. I use the sucker almost every day.

It takes what used to be about a 5 click, 4 copy/paste operation to give me, in one motion, the HTML needed to embed a Creative Commons licensed flickr photo in my blog- and– the format is consistent every time.

But last week, a tweet from Alec Courous got me thinking, that there are times when you want an attribution string that is not HTML, e.g., when you are using flickr photos in say a presentation.

I took about 10 minutes to add that feature.

The new version 0.3 of my script at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49395 now adds a second text box that has an attribution string in text:

Either box is automatically select when you click it, so it is just a command-c away from being used.

The one piece is that maybe you want your attribution done a different way- mine is formatted like:

cc licensed flickr photo by Zzzzzz Zzzzzzzzz: http://flickr.com/photos/xxxxx/ZZZZZZZZZ/

Hey, I had to choose something. If there is something better, please make suggestions, but you can also edit the script yourself! Just look under the Firefox Tools menu for Greasemonkey, then select Manage User Scripts. Select the script you want to edit… and click the Edit button (you may have to select a text editor; I use BBEdit Lite, but whatever you have for a plain text editor will do).

You will need to edit line 67, and it would help to know a bot of JavaScript for how it puts strings together:

// create content to insert to page
   div_attrib.innerHTML = '<br /><br />CC Attribution (HTML)<br /><textarea rows="5" onClick="this.select()" name="ccattweb"><a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '"><img src="' + photosrc + '" /></a><br /><small><a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '">'  + 'cc licensed flickr photo</a> shared by <a href="' + userlink + '">' + usernick + '</a></small></textarea><br />CC Attribution (text)<br /><textarea rows="5" onClick="this.select()" name="ccatttxt">cc licensed flickr photo by ' + usernick + ': ' + photolink + '</textarea>';

And it is the last part that is the text version. You could do something shorter like:

// create content to insert to page
   div_attrib.innerHTML = '<br /><br />CC Attribution (HTML)<br /><textarea rows="5" onClick="this.select()" name="ccattweb"><a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '"><img src="' + photosrc + '" /></a><br /><small><a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '">'  + 'cc licensed flickr photo</a> shared by <a href="' + userlink + '">' + usernick + '</a></small></textarea><br />CC Attribution (text)<br /><textarea rows="5" onClick="this.select()" name="ccatttxt">cc licensed flickr photo: ' + photolink + '</textarea>';

or longer like:

// create content to insert to page
   div_attrib.innerHTML = '<br /><br />CC Attribution (HTML)<br /><textarea rows="5" onClick="this.select()" name="ccattweb"><a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '"><img src="' + photosrc + '" /></a><br /><small><a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '">'  + 'cc licensed flickr photo</a> shared by <a href="' + userlink + '">' + usernick + '</a></small></textarea><br />CC Attribution (text)<br /><textarea rows="5" onClick="this.select()" name="ccatttxt">creative commons licensed photo"' phototitle "'" by flickr user:' + usernick + ' found at ' + photolink + '</textarea>';

Your mileage may vary.

So what do you think? This is way better than sliced bread! And its free!

One of my primary uses of Google Search is locating URLs for web pages I am creating, blog posts, etc. The way Google outputs search results in a PITA as the links to the results are obfuscated in redirects through google (things they do to harvest our actions).

In the old days, the search result was a link to the actual result. You could copy it and move on. They changed it back and forth a few times on 2005, but since then, that blue link is worthless as a copiable URL. Since then, I have been doing the tedious manual copy of the real URL that is written in green text below the results.

Until recently. For long URLs, Google is now even strealing that as useful information, as it abbreviates long URLs with ellipses in the middle. As is the only way to get the actual URL for a web search result is to follow the link to the page (cause that’s What Google Wants– its lot like I am reading the page, I am scraping the URL).

Huh?

Here is a search I did this morning on augmented reality. The blue links to the results do not provide URLs I can copy. The green text for the second long link is now re-written with “….” i the middle, so that is a URL I cannot use. I am hosed.

So I started thinking I might have to write a Greasemonkey Script that would display the actual links. I went to http://userscripts.org looking for some existing scripts I could use as models to parse the results (have you ever looked at the source of a page of google results? It’s not your grandpa’a HTML).

But then it dawned on me…

What is someone had already done this?

doh.

They did.

Dugeen had created the Obviously Scrub Google Redirect Links which works perfectly- it adds the real link adjacent to the blue on produced by Google- and this is one I can right/controil click to copy the link URL right from the search results! Yay.

This is so handy.

And also– despite excitement for new web browsers, something lacking the ability to re-cast web content like Greasemonkey does is going to make it hard for me to step away from Firefox.

Hah, take that Google – you url obfuscating boogers! Gotcha.

But even better- there is a little “i” in the lower right corner that when you click it, provides in a lightbox overlay, a bigger preview, numbers of views, tags, dates taken– and if you are searching flickr wide, you can filter out that photographer from the results (I would guess if you think their photos are irrelevant or in appropriate or …?). This was the search for my old dog friend among my photos

It’s small, maybe even overdue, but helpful.

Of course, I still do my creative commons search on compfight and wish they would copy this preview overlay!

But hey I don’t get this. I made (what I think is) this awesome Firefox Greasemonkey script that adds a full cut and paste code to provide a fully attributed, captioned link in blog posts. I use it all the time, and there’s only 105 downloads for something that can reduce the back and forth copy pasting of giving attribution from like 7 steps to one. WTF? Even more pathetic I am the only fan ;-)

Here’s how it works. Any flickr image that has a creative commons license will display a copyable block of HTML code:

Where by copying and then pasting the code- you get the 500pixel image, a link to the original, and a caption with links for the image and creator– e.g.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I thought that was pretty damned handy! Try it out yourself http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49395

What is does is adds a box on the right side of flickr photo pages — only for photos with a Creative Commons License — some HTML you can copy and paste for a blog post.

I found an existing script Flickr Photo Link but that was meant to grab the entire image URL (mine is meant for a caption assuming you have already inserted an image into a blog post or web page). Also, that 3 year old script did not even work because it was not parsing correctly for the user name the way it does the XPath search on the <b> tag (looks like flick added a foaf attribute), but also, I did not like the way it stuck the code to copy in the comment text area which would get in the way of making comments.

But that script was a good start, and with a little bit of trial an error, I have the HTML being inserted in a text area on the sidebar. I have not yet mastered how to exactly place it using the flickr pages DOm structure, so it is hanging in the Tags content part. If someone better at GreaseMonkeying can help me move it say below the license area, I’d be a tali wagging coder.

And this is really set up for the way I write my photo links. I don;t just insert the image link from flickr; I download the image, upload to my blog, and then add after something like for say, this dreamy I’d like to be there now image:

<br /><small>
<a title="Outlet on the Sound" 
href="http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3425479991/">
cc licensed flickr photo</a> shared by 
<a href="http://flickr.com/people/cogdog/">
cogdogblog</a></small>

or as displayed:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

So in some sense, this is hardwired to the way I compose my attribution, although, it does not take too much to edit the script. I may add as a default the embed code for the image itself from flickr, since that is the way people likely use images anyhow (I like to have them on my own server).

I should also add some javascript that selects all the text when the mouse clicks in the box.

This is really just a crude first cut at this script, more to see if it is of use (and heck, I will use it if no one else does). Give it a try and let me know what it needs http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49395

UPDATE: With help form Patrick, the 0.2 version of the script now is placed better in the flickr sidebar. I added to the HTML you get the link to display the image and link to the source photo, and added script so when you click in the field, the text is automatically selected for quick copying