If you’re vigilant (nosy, bored, etc.), you’ve probably noticed that nearly all of our image credits here in the blog are labeled something like this:

Photo credit: [owner] via photopin [license]

There’s a pretty sweet tool behind that simple line of text, saving us plenty of headaches. We’re pretty serious about open licensing and attribution, but it can be a bit of a pain to find, import, label, and link all those photos. Flickr has been a leader in allowing image owners to share their work under open licenses, but sorting through their collections can also be a bit time-consuming. Fortunately, their API allows a single-minded third party (AKA Photo Pin) to provide some super convenient, one-stop shopping for folks like us.

What
Photo Pin A simple, single-function site based on a Flickr API that finds openly licensed (Creative Commons) photos, provides download links, a direct link to the photo page, and some HTML for providing proper attribution. You can sort your results by license type (commercial/non-commercial) and focus on what is most recent, relevant, or interesting. Learn more here.

Who
Max & Sameer, apparently. They’ve got more toys and tools where this came from. (Many of them are geared more towards designers and developers than commoners like ourselves…but what better way to learn than to dive into the unknown?)

Highlights
In keeping with the visual spirit of Photo Pin, We’ll illustrate with some screenshots:

(Part of) the homepage, in all its simple glory…and yes, in real life you can click on all of the thumbnails, too:

What’s going on behind the scenes of the Eiffel Tower image we used for this post? Here you go! The HTML in the bottom right, with a tweak or two, is what’s generating the attribution below.

Do you know of services like Photo Pin? Is there a resource we should be talking about in this Friday feature? Let us know on social media, by email, or in the comments!

Photo credits: Main photo by danorbit. via photopin CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; additional images screenshots taken by author of materials copyright 2012 by Photo Pin.