The Origins of Lightboxr

Getting stock photography for design work is more difficult that it should be. Until very recently royalty free images cost a fortune and did not really cater for use on the web. The market has changed and there are now quite a few websites which offer pretty reasonable rates for use of stock imagery. But even at one pound or one dollar a go, that can still add up. Other sites work on a subscription basis which can reduce the cost even more but are only good if you regularly need images and in volume.

The next problem with stock imagery is that the people who created them want to reach as big a market as possible, so the images tend to fall into very generic categories and even good ones can still have a very stilted or artificial feel about them.

There are a number of sites which help find free-to-use photos, but the selection is often limited in quantity (i.e. only a few thousand images) and the various licenses they use require reading a lot of fine print for each image you are evaluating. This adds this extra burden to the already tedious process of searching, sorting and evaluating images to find the one you want to use.

Enter flickr.com and its use of the Creative Commons license. Even though only a fraction of the images on flickr are shared with this license, there are still several million images available under the six different variations of the license. Since you can search for only images licensed this way, you know what the license terms are without having to read terms for each image.

Because there are so many photographs by so many different people, there is a freshness and variety of images that is unparalleled in any other image source. Not only are the images free-to-use and royalty free but you can often find photos of things that just cannot be found in normal stock libraries.

The only real “catch” and it’s not really even a catch, is that the Creative Commons license in all variants requires you give credit to the image’s creator or owner. On the web that is pretty easy since you can use the “alt” and “title” attributes of the “img” tag and can even provide a link back to the flickr page where the image comes from.

A technique, that we have used and which is easy to employ using lightboxr, is to create a photo credits page, and have all images on the site link to the credits page. This is good for several reasons. First visitors to your site will not be confused by being whisked off to flickr if they click on an image expecting to go to somewhere within your site. Second, the photo credits page can give credit to the owners of the image more visibly without interfering with your primary design. Third, you can use the extra space to show your appreciation to the photographers and also spreading the word about the Creative Commons license.

Lightboxr started when we were designing a site for Media Friendly and wanted about thirty images for the banner at the top of the page design. Because the site is aimed at professionals who work with the media in public relations or press officers for large organisations, naff stock images of people pretending to be reporters and the like seemed to be adding a “falseness” to the whole site design.

Being aware of the Creative Commons licensing on flickr we started looking and quickly found all the images we needed of real reports, camera men, studios and so on. But there were two noticeable problems in the work flow.

The first was a way of collecting images so that we could review the ones we had gathered and still get back to the source page easily. However this is done we needed to grab a copy of the image and create a bookmark. It was obvious that it would be really nice to do both at once and without much hassle, but there was not real solution available.

The second problem came after we had selected which images to use and were complying with the terms of the license by creating the credits page. This required going back to each of the original pages and copying a url for the owner, one for the image itself, one for the Creative Commons license (since different images used different variants of the license) and we also needed a thumbnail version of each image. This was a slow and laborious process.

Again knowing about the flickr services API we wrote lightboxr to help you do this work as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The initial idea was to use a bookmarklet, much like those provided by the social bookmarking websites. But browser compatibility can be a problem and it also means configuring each browser. There are also problems with popup suppressors which would be problematic for some users. Plus when it came down to it, being able to search, collect and process the images all in a single window interface seemed like a simpler and more efficient way of working.

With the links back to flickr on every thumbnail, the user can hop back to flickr in no time at all and the import facility makes it easy to copy a url from a flickr page and paste it into the lightboxr interface.

So that is the story. We hope you will find this site useful.