on pinterest. and flickr. and a bit on copyright.

i've been on pinterest since pretty early on and have been following all the copyright controversy with interest (if you have no idea what i am talking about, google "pinterest and copyright" and prepare to have your mind boggled). i use pinterest as my own personal pinboard, to keep track of inspiration, recipes and tutorials. no, i don't always credit where the image came from, actually i barely ever do, but since you just have to click on the image to find the original source (or the source where it was pinned from, anyway) and see it in context, i don't really see the need. and i don't really see the harm in sharing images via pinterest, except that some people don't want to and don't have a way of controlling it and aren't happy about it and that is fair enough.

so i tried to pin one of my own images from flickr yesterday and was confounded by text reading "sorry, you cannot pin this image" over each of my own photos. a bit of google research led me to the knowledge that flickr has implemented an universal "opt out of sharing" feature and it is automatically set to not share (by the way, flickr, it would have been nice to have an email or something about this new policy and how to tackle it - did i miss that?). i mucked around with my sharing and copyright features for ages but just could not get my images to pin so i sent a quick email off to their help dept. anyway, they answered back within 24 hours which was great and i thought i'd share the info sent in case anyone else actually wants to share their images via flickr (my blog pics are from my flickr photostream too so if i didn't change my settings, no one would be able to pin anything from this here blog either).

You can modify your settings by going to the link below:
http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/optout/

In addition, you may select which photos to include in
searches by following the steps below:
1. Go to Organizr by clicking "Organize & Create".
2. Select the photos you'd like to include.
3. From the "Permissions" menu, click "Hide/show in public searches".
4. Please make sure that the checkbox is not selected.


pin away.


ps. i previously had all of my images set to "All rights reserved" but have just changed to the creative commons license "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND" which means "allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially." if you want to learn more about creative commons, you can read about the license options here and can implement them to all or select images in flickr (still can't stop someone from just downloading your pic and doing what they will with it but at least you've made your preferences known and have a legal foot to stand on should the need arise).