Who the photographs belong to

Why this page exists

A photograph under a Creative Commons licence is not a gift but a permission with a condition attached: whoever uses the picture names the person who took it and the licence they released it under. This page is where that can be checked — by the photographers themselves, and by anyone who wants to reuse one of these pictures and needs to know what they are allowed to do with it.

Only genuinely free licences are used: public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA. Anything carrying NC (non-commercial) or ND (no derivatives) is left out, because a school should be able to print these pages and a library to mirror them without having to work through a licence text first.

If you took one of these photographs and something about the credit is wrong — a misspelt name, an out-of-date licence, or a picture you would rather not see here — that is a mistake worth fixing, regardless of what the licence would permit.

What the abbreviations mean

CC BY means the picture may be used for anything as long as the creator is named. CC BY-SA adds that an edited version has to be passed on under the same licence. CC0 and public domain mean the rights were waived or have expired — the photographer is still named here, because they did the work.

The licences in use on this site: CC BY 2.0, CC BY 2.5, CC BY 3.0, CC BY 3.0 de, CC BY 3.0 pl, CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 2.0, CC BY-SA 2.5, CC BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 at, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, CC BY-SA 3.0 ee, CC BY-SA 3.0 lu, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, CC BY-SA 4.0, CC0, Public domain.

Everything else on this site is drawn rather than photographed: the globe is painted as it loads, the outline maps and comparison bars are generated graphics, the sharing previews are drawn when the site is built. Photographs appear where a drawing would not answer the question — what this animal really looks like, what this country looks like, what this city looks like.

How a picture gets here

The search does not look for "lion". It looks for "Panthera leo". An animal's everyday name turns up coats of arms, statues, football badges and restaurant signs; its scientific name turns up animals. That is also why the scientific name is printed at the top of every animal page — it is the one name that is the same in every language.

Then comes the filtering. Skulls, skeletons, museum specimens, distribution maps, postage stamps, drawings and soft toys are thrown out by their file titles: a child looking up a walrus should not be shown its skull. What remains are photographs at least 1000 pixels wide with a named creator — no name, no picture, because without a name the licence condition could not be met at all.

Three pictures per animal survive: one large, two smaller beneath it. Each is stored at several sizes so that a phone does not download the version made for a large screen, and each carries its real dimensions so the text below it does not jump as it loads.

And for places?

A country is not a thing you can photograph. So the search does not look for "Norway" but for Norway's landscape, its countryside and its national parks — three searches that return places rather than flags, maps and portraits of politicians. For a capital city the country goes into the search too: that is the difference between Georgia the country and Georgia the American state.

The filtering is then stricter than it is for animals. Country searches on Wikimedia Commons return war photography, funerals and protests without being asked — for some countries that is what the first page of results holds. Titles suggesting war, weapons, injury, victims or nudity are thrown out, and so are parliament buildings, election posters and portraits of politicians. This site is built for children, and that is not a place to let a picture through on the off-chance.

Where the rest comes from

The photographs are not the only borrowed thing on this site. The borders, the country records, the coordinates of every capital, the population figures, the typefaces and the engine that draws the globe were all made by other people and shared under licences that ask to be named. Naming them here is the same obligation as naming a photographer.

The words on these pages are our own, and so are the outline maps, the comparison bars and the sharing pictures: those are drawn by the site as it is built, from the data above.

The complete list