LET: The Treasure Hunt Club

Marcel Van Amelsvoort
（Kanagawa Prefectural College of Foreign Studies）
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Hello everyone. Many of you probably remember the early days of the web when
pages consisted largely of static text content. Text was fast to load and
easy to create. Images, on the other hand, were heavy and slow. But so much
has changed in the last ten years. Images (and video) are everywhere now.
They can be saved, stored and used easily by anyone. And that has become a
problem. You see, taking an image from the web and posting it in your blog
is illegal if it is not your image. So what can you do if you want to add

pictures to your web page or blog post? Well, you can take lots of digital
images yourself and keep them on your computer for use when you need. And
you can go to a photo site like Flickr.com and after you find an image you
like, write to the owner and ask for permission. Recently however, a number
of web sites hosting photos and images that are free to use (usually under a
Creative Commons license) have appeared, which can make accessing images
faster and easier (and more legal!). They are great places to find good,
usable content for teachers or students. I have these sites linked to my
class blogs so students know where to go to find images, instead of trawling
the web for images they don't have the right to use. For the purpose of
comparing these services, I did a search for "Yokohama" at each one. As
you can see, the results varied quite a bit.

The first website is actually a search engine for free use Flickr photos by
Dan Coulter. Photos are displayed with information about their license for
use. A recent search on Yokohama resulted in more than 35,000 images, though
many did not seem to have a clear connection to Yokohama. To use the image,
you just copy and embed the code into your website or blog. The image and
information about the author and license then appear.
http://johnjohnston.name/flickrCC/

Another site where you can search for Flickr images is Behold. The search
engine is good, but users have to then go to the Flickr page and get the
relevant information to post along with any images used. My search for
Yokohama images brought up only 53 images, but they were all very nice and
artistic. http://www.behold.cc/

FreeFoto is a site that allows you to search by category. To use the images,
you have to provide attribution (who took the image) and a link back to the
FreeFoto site. I didn't find any images of Yokohama when I did a search.
This photo bank seems to specialize more in Europe and the US and business
images. http://www.freefoto.com/index.jsp

And the last site is called Morguefile. My search for Yokohama images here
brought back 178 images. For some images, you don't have to provide any
attribution and you are free to use the image as you like. For some other
images, you have to write the name of the photographer when you use the
image and there are restrictions on how you can use it.
http://www.morguefile.com/

Well, that's all for this month. Happy photo hunting and see you next month.

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