How to see who is using your Flickr photos on the web

I license all my photographs under a Creative Commons attribution license. This means that people are allowed to do whatever they want with my images so long as they attribute me.

I like the idea of letting people use my 20 000 odd photos for whatever they need. My photographs have been used on some of the my favorite sites on the interweebs including; Wired, Engadget, Treehugger, The Guardian UK, and many more. It’s fun and I get a kick of out of it when I see someone using my photos.

So, if you want to find out who is using your photos a handy little trick is to use Technorati or Google Blog Search to see who is linking to your Flickr account.

On Google Blog Search (and Technorati but who uses that anymore?) just input the URL of your Flickr account into the search bar and hit enter:

This will only return results from people who are linking to your photos. If people are just taking your photos and using them with no attribution link you’re SOL.

Check out how much link love homey Kris Krug gets because his photography is amazing and he also put his schteeze under a creative commons license over here.

With Google Blog Search you can setup an alert if you’d like to be emailed when people use your photos. I prefer to just subscribe to the feed myself because I get enough BACN already as it is. This is old hat for the tech savvy kids but I thought I’d share it with you as well.

If you want to have your photos used as well I’d suggest:

• Tag your photos properly
• Name your photos well
• Put a Creative Commons license on them (share the love)

If you want to find Flickr photos you can use for your own projects check out the creative commons flickr search:
http://flickr.com/creativecommons/

*BTW, if you ask people to link to your site instead of your Flickr account this can improve your Google juice…

[cc logo by uploaded by drew baldwin | Fashion Photography | Kris Krug]