You can–and hopefully will!–use your own images, music, and video on ePortfolio course and personal sites. However, if you do decide to use media other than your own, whether a photo or music, you should make sure it’s media that the owner/creator has licensed other people to use for free, and that you remember to give proper credit (attribution) when you use that media.

Attributing images and videos

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that provides free, standardized copyright licenses; these licenses allow people to take creative work they own the copyright to and make it available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.

In other words, CC licenses let people change their copyright from the default “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright, but rather modify a creator’s copyright.

You can use Creative Commons-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions, one of which is attribution. Here are good (and not so good) examples of image attribution. Usually, a photo credit is printed below the image as a small caption. You will need to include as much of this information as you can:

Notice that the attribution goes beyond just giving a link!

Creative Commons image collections

Here are some places you can find images that you can use, usually with attribution, for your sites. You can also use your own images, of course, and you may want to give yourself attribution (“Summer outside my apartment building,” photo by Mabel Mora).

Or, you can Google “creative commons images” or “free to use images” to find sites that offer images you can use with attribution.