Wiki Commons and other “gratis” image repositories contain various images with various “free” licenses.
Some licenses like some Creative Commons licenses allow using the image but only with giving credit to the uploader, such as linking to the information webpage of the image in the repository website.
Credit for images in the web were always traditionally given in an image caption under an image:
IMAGE
Credit: Wiki Commons (link to the information webpage of the image in Wiki Commons)
But, in case the image is a background image, no image caption is available and I don’t know what is a good way to give an image credit in such case.
Putting the credit as the image alt text isn’t feasible
Putting the credit as the mouse-hover image title isn’t feasible
Putting the credit in a HTML comment right under the <img> element isn’t feasible.
How to properly give credit for a background picture with a free license that requires credit?
If only you had asked about this site before…and been given a link… in that thread that had a section specifically for their requirements for hotlinking…and a link from there to the page specifically about how to reuse and cite content…and another link to a tool for generating the correct attribution…
I assume you meant to the section that links to that Wiki Commons Attribution Generator tool but here I don’t ask necessarily about Wiki Commons and anyway I am still in a loss about where to put license details when the image is a background image.
Please note, that the license notice includes hyperlinks, which have to be included wherever you make use of the license notice. You should show this information as close to the image as resonably possible (e.g. directly below it). In any case, viewers must be able to find the information easily. To make it easier for you, the tool provides the attribution including all hyperlinks in plain text format and as an html snippet. This way, you can transfer it directly into the source code of your webpage.
For background images that’s quite not practical to show the license details “as close to the image as reasonably possible”.
Dear @TechnoBear Putting the license in the fotter of the webpage will look strange for a user who just seek a simple footer to navigate in the website.
Maybe I should create a webpage named “Image copyrights”, put license details there, and then put a link to that webpage from the footer.
… you dont ask necessarily about the site you named by name and linked to in the first two words of your thread post.
Okay. Sure.
Directly below a full-page background would be the bottom of the page, in a footer. Not all images (nor all sites) will have the same requirements for attribution though, so you have to check each image’s attribution requirements individually.
Wiki Commons and other “gratis” image repositories
I am sorry, was this badly phrased? I meant that Wiki Commons and other “gratis” image repositories which also often require credit/attribution to the image uploader and/or to the repository.
Besides Wiki Commons, all free image repositories I know of don’t require such credit/attribution at all, but I just wanted to cover each one I don’t know of, that that does require it.
Maybe I’m strange , because I would look in the footer for credits, copyright info, etc. I would only look for navigation links in the footer if I’d failed to find what I wanted in the main nav.
That’s rather a convoluted method, to my mind, and doesn’t comply with the requirement you quoted:
You should show this information as close to the image as resonably possible (e.g. directly below it).
So here’s where i take 3 minutes of my day, right click on one of the images on that site, find that it’s a still that’s been ripped from a Shutterstock video (So… a licensed work), and look at you and tell you to be very careful what you use. Even if your defense is “Well i got it from a free pics site”, lawyers will still snap at anything they can get their mouths on
, because I would look in the footer for credits, copyright info, etc. I would only look for navigation links in the footer if I’d failed to find what I wanted in the main nav. 
