Thing 3: Image Banks

I was excited about this ‘Thing’ as I do believe images are important for enhancing online content. However, in the past I have felt trapped in relation to copyright. Can I use this image? Should I be using this image? Sometimes I may have chosen a different image to the actual one I wanted due to not knowing the correct copyright procedure! I was aware of CreativeCommons but did not realise its full remit or its origins. This was good to know.

I was already aware of Flickr and have viewed and downloaded images from this before. So, for this task I decided to work on Pixabay as I hadn’t heard of it before.

The image I wanted to search for was of five ducklings, as my daughter is very much into singing ‘Five Little Ducks Went Swimming One Day’ and the tune was my head. There were no matches returned for the term ‘five little ducks’, so I tired just ‘ducklings’. 376 free images returned. I narrowed this down to photos only, which provided 318 images. I noted however I could also choose between graphics, illustrations or videos. I liked that you could also choose the orientation of the image. This is very useful if you have a specific purpose in mind for an image and it has to fit a certain size space. I chose horizontal which narrowed my choices down to 305. I then selected a category which again reduced my choices even further. There were now 141 images of ducklings under ‘nature/landscape’ category. If needed, the size and image colour can be defined. I played with these options but left them blank in the end.

I really liked how Pixabay lets you narrow your choices in various ways. Sometimes you can be overwhelmed with images when you only have a small idea of what you want. It was a lot easier to settle on one images from 141 choices than 305.

I chose my image and selected it. This opened it up in a page of its own and gave me some extra information about the image. For instance, on the right it informed me of its Creative Commons restrictions which were ‘Free for commercial use. No attribution required’. The page also offered me some related images, useful in the future perhaps, but not this time.

There was a very accessible ‘Free Download’ option directly under the Creative Commons notice. I liked this. Sometimes webpages ‘hide’ the user friendly buttons. When I selected ‘download’ it offered me 4 options of image sizes and once selected it downloaded straight to my downloads folder. Hassle free.

So here it is, three little ducks and their mammy. Apologies if you have the song in your head for the rest of the day now.