I am trying to get more pictures to use for our website as main banner images and marketing images. I have been allowed to use some images but others are demanding a credit on the images of their brand. Basically a “link to their website” but not a clickable one. -Photos By Jill Turner theturnerlady3636747.com sorta thing.
We are a eCommerce website that offers products for sale. I think giving credit to images is a bad idea. I prefer to use images with no credit to outside sources. Names are fine but not brands. Even names are not common among eCommerce websites. Images used by big and even small companies never have names or brand names of the users on them.
What is your opinion?
One of the persons brand also has “badass” in the title and I am concerned it will offend some and not look professional on our part to have cursing/slang on our website.
Content owner gets to set their own rights. They can choose to charge a monetary fee, or they can charge a fee like this where they don’t want monetary remuneration, but advertising like that.
If you don’t like their terms, you’re going to have to find other sources for your images. Or create your own.
IMHO, going by what “everyone else” does isn’t the best idea. It could be they have violated terms and haven’t been “caught” yet, maybe they obtained permission to use the others’ content the way they use it, maybe there are other details you are unaware of.
My feelings about using others’ content are heavily influenced by my educational background i.e. citing sources.
In other words, even when something is “public domain” or “fair use”, it is natural for me to include attribution. eg. if I found a script by DaveMaxwell on GitHub that I liked but wanted to modify I would include a line somewhere like
this script is a derivative work of DaveMaxwell’s Awesome Script https://github.com/davemaxell/awesome_script
For me, giving credit where credit is due is the decent thing to do even if it is not necessary or required to do so.
I wouldn’t. Looks unprofessional, IMO. I always get new clients to do a photo shoot with a professional photographer. Looks much more, well, professional…
I see that point of view and how it fits in the context of some sites. One site I am involved with is for a volunary, non-profit organisation. The site is largely informational with much of the content of a historical nature. It contains various articles by myself and others which often cite sources and I may illustrate those with images from various sources which I will give attribution to where appropriate and that all seems quite right and normal in that context, in fact stating where the image came from is added value to the visitor.
However another site I’m involved in is much more like the OP’s, it’s eCommerce for profit and lists products with associated images. In that context I would think picture attribution seems an unnecessary distraction and of no interest to the user who just want to see what the prouct looks like. There I give no attribution. The images I use are either those supplied by the manufacturer for marketing purposes, or I go and take photos of the product myself, I would probably not want to use an image that required attribution there.
This is just my opinion, some may think it’s OK to have that on an eCommerce site, it’s up to you to decide for yourself what you think is right for your site.