Flickr Goes 4.0 CC Licenses so My CC Attribution Helper Follows

Throw a party, in 2025 Flickr announces the arrival of Creative Commons version 4.0 licenses (cough, 12 years in the works?).

I’d seen the announcement banner on flickr, though gave it no notice (especially since I use CC0 on my own photos, no versions needed). That is until I spotted a note from Sarah Honeychurch in the Reclaim Hosting Discord channel.

Does anyone else use @cogdog flickr attribution bookmarklet? It’s stopped working for my most recent uploads and I think it might be connected to flickr changing their cc licenses from 2.0 to 4.0 …

She is referring to the Flickr CC Attribution Helper my own little tool I built and used since 2009. It’s old web school- when viewing at a Flickr image, say some random photo of a dog. The CC Attribution Helper creates a browser bookmarklet tool, so I just click, and it opens a window with a few different kinds of attribution strings I can copy in one click (this one creates cut and paste for WordPress, plus an HTML and a text only version).

Flickr CC attribution helper in action. From view of a flickr page, click on bookmarklet tool, up poops window, click on attribution text, copy, and go.

I had not noticed any issue since I mostly use my own photos, which again are not affected by license versions. But when I changed one of my photos to a CC 4.0 license, I could definitely see the helper was stalllng out.

I had to shake the dust off of my crude Javascript code, but the functions in my cc-attributor.js functions, that the generation depending on knowing the codes the flickr api uses for licenses. Until now, these were 0-10 for various licenses and public domain, and 0 being nasty copyrighted.

When I checked the flickr api documentation, I only saw the codes listed for 0-10. So I ran a test on the API for flickr.photos.getInfo (kudos to flickr that I can make test API calls right here), I spotted a a return ode of 11 for a photo I had changed to CC BY 4.0. I was able to find the new codes (11-16) by testing via flickr.photos.licenses.getAvailable (note I contacted flickr support and the have updated the info in flickr.photos.licenses.getInfo to now include all of the new license codes.

Mumbo jumbo code fluey, but I added some code to check for license codes above 10 to make them use 4.0 and the old ones in 0-10 return 2.0.

a.k.a. it now works.

Here is what the flickr cc attribution helper provides for a CC BY 2.0 licensed photo

Four flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

And for one now published under CC BY 4.0

Four For Two (and all) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license

If you have been using the flickr cc attribution helper, you might need to clean your browsers cached files to get the new javascript code or as I did do a shift refresh on the file itself.

The tool is still a bit crude, it was built with different versions needed to do old WordPress image with captions or Markdown, and you have to pick a desired size for images. One day I might modernize the interface.

But the things works for me, and I use it almost every day I am using flickr photos, which is like almost every day. And I smile when Is attribution strings I recognize from it on other people’s sites. I wrote the attribution in my interpretation of good TASL wording but being on GitHub, if you want to customize the output, you can fork and go (some folks have).

I had to dig back into the history but I did a first version in May 2009 using Greasemonkey scripts to modify the flickr page itself to insert attribution text (I am pretty sure Scott Leslie suggested that approach). Looks like the old userscripts.org domain points to a dance site. C’est La Web.

That did mean every time flickr changed its interface, I had to update my scripts, which depending on the structure of the page’s DOM. That propelled me in 2014 to make the current version, hosted in GitHub (yeah Dave, I know the horrors of GitHub, one day…) that provdes through a public link https://code.cog.dog/flickr-cc-helper/ a way to choose your options for output, and it generates the drag and drop link to put the tool on your browser bookmarks bar.

It feels good to keep the tool alive, just for my own self satisfaction– and regular use.

That’s it, Flickr is now 4.0 on CC attributing and the helper tool isn in step.

Featured Image: Another of my Four themed photos attributed here with the flicks cc attribution helper. Four Lines flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)