Lesson 9: Keeping Your Legal Images Accessible To You

Lesson 9: Keeping Your Legal Images Accessible To You
By Melissa Olivero

I am not organized. I want to be and I try very hard to stay on top of everything. But I have ADD though, so if a system is going to work for me -- it has to be easy for my thinking process and pretty anal to boot. I am going to share two different methods with you... And you can go from there.... It really depends on your method of creation. I come up with an idea first and then go to work. Others see the image and then create.

This is how I do it:

When I find a free use image site -- whether it is tubes, photos or graphics -- I do not stay there and snag. I put the link in a special folder in my favorites. I don't see the need to collect all these graphics anymore to my hard drive. When I am ready to create something -- I will surf my saved sites until something hits me. If a site disappears... Well, then I just wasn't meant to work with that artwork.

I only have about 3,000 or so links on this computer's Internet Explorer. I am still re-building my favorites from when I upgraded my computer. I saved my old links and they are still on the spare hard drive and then I have another set on a cd. These folders represent all of the research I've done over the years. I've always collected links. I have folders for all hobbies I've gotten into and information that I have researched. If something catches my eye -- I read about it, learn about it and save the information in case it’s needed later. If I can stay on top of my links -- then I don't need to save things to my hard drive unless it is something I cannot live without if the website were to ever disappear.

These can be further broken down...like under Tubes Free Use -- you can have sub-folders for different types of graphics (I.e. Country, furniture, floral, etc).

A Second Method:

If I were to save graphics to my hard drive now -- it would indeed be difficult sometimes to make sure it stayed organized.

But you can if you put the system into place ahead of time. Each time you go to a website... let's say http://www.freefoto.com/index.jsp and you find a photo that you like.. Save it to a folder in your hard drive and call that folder Ian Britton (the photographer's name). Once you have created the folder, open up "Notepad" and copy & paste his terms into it. Then save that .txt file in the "Ian Britton" folder and you now will have no trouble knowing what the terms are and you have easy access to the photos.

If you have a clipart cd that you have purchased... I have one from Hemera... When I search for a certain type of image... I may not use all that I find, but I may find ones that I like. So I want to save those images to my hard drive so I can save time from running a search. That is where subfolders come into play again like so:

(Erika, the name shown in the URL in the above graphic... She is my wonderfully talented sister who built my computer.)

If it were a CD with stricter terms... Like I think Dover Publications, Hugware are... Then you would type yourself a note in notepad about their restrictions and save it to that file.

Honestly -- once the initial system is in place -- it is a breeze. I first started giving credit to people by the tuber. I hadn't yet realized that I was stealing from artists, but had learned how hard it is to tube an image sometimes and wanted to give a link back to the tuber. I also wanted to share tubes on sharing lists, so I created a folder for each tuber and then copy & pasted her "sharing rules" into a .txt file and saved it to her particular folder.

Stealing artwork is easy. Not stealing art and still being able to create does require just a small amount of effort (small in comparison to what the artist did to provide the artwork). Clichés are clichés because they are usually true -- You've got to work for the things that are worth something. It is worth creating a system.

Look at it this way -- by the time you are done with the class -- you just may be ready to delete all of your stolen images and start fresh -- in doing that -- you are wiping a clean slate for yourself to create a new system of organization.