Openly licensed photographs as material

An openly licensed photograph is one whose photographer has said in advance that anyone may use it, under conditions written into a standard licence. Standard licences of this kind come from Creative Commons. The first versions were released on 16 December 2002, and according to the organisation tens of billions of works now carry one.^1, 2 Two of its tools leave an artist free to cut, combine and sell: CC BY and CC0.

What the licences allow

CC BY 4.0 (released in November 2013) lets anyone copy and redistribute the material and "remix, transform, and build upon" it, for any purpose, even commercially.^1, 3 The condition is attribution: give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made.³

CC0 (released in 2009) is a waiver rather than a licence with conditions: the photographer gives up all copyright and related rights as far as the law allows. No attribution is required, though users may give it.^1, 4

Where the photographs are

One large collection is Wikimedia Commons, a free media repository to which anyone can contribute, which on 20 October 2026 held 149,797,865 freely usable files.⁵ Other platforms record a licence for each photograph separately, so a program can ask for only CC0 and CC BY images and leave the rest. Each photograph then carries its licence and its photographer's name as data, which a program can print next to the result as easily as it reads the image.⁶

Many photographs, one image

Laying many photographs over each other is an old method. In the late nineteenth century Francis Galton exposed several portraits on the same photographic plate to make a composite portrait, and used it to try to define the faces of health, disease, beauty and criminality.⁷ The method averages: what the pictures share stays, what is particular to each fades.⁸

The alternative is to keep, at every point of the image, whichever photograph is sharpest there, so nothing is averaged away. Each photographer's subject, the thing they focused on, survives, and the blurred backgrounds give way.⁸

Where to see it

Olof Broström's Group Photos does this once a day on JAEV's server. Ten photographs are drawn at random from those uploaded that day to a public platform where people share observations of plants, animals and fungi, each by a different photographer and each with a free licence, and combined by sharpness.⁸ Group Photo 0121, made on 19 October 2026, was drawn from 5,729 photographs posted that day; its page lists the ten sources, each with its share of the image, its photographer and its licence, CC BY or CC0.⁶