Image licensing for animal content
A photo is only usable if its license allows it. FaunaHub stores local, optimised copies of animal images only when the license permits commercial use and modification, preserves the original author and license, and discloses captive or staged contexts. This page explains those rules.
Licenses FaunaHub accepts
FaunaHub uses images released under licenses that allow both commercial use and modification:
- Public Domain
- CC0
- CC BY
- CC BY-SA
Most come from Wikimedia Commons, which records a license and author for each file, alongside compatible images from government and science agencies. The license terms themselves are defined by Creative Commons.
Licenses and sources FaunaHub rejects
- CC BY-NC (non-commercial)
- CC BY-ND (no derivatives)
- GFDL-only
- All rights reserved
- Unclear or missing license
- Unknown author
- Watermarked images
- Social media, Pinterest, or Google Images results
Why derivative rights matter for WebP
FaunaHub does not hotlink originals. It downloads a permitted image, resizes it, and encodes an optimised WebP copy for fast, reliable loading. Creating that copy is a modification, so the license must allow derivatives — which is why no-derivatives (ND) images cannot be used, however good they are.
Attribution and honest captions
For licenses that require it (such as CC BY and CC BY-SA), FaunaHub stores and displays the author and license, gathered on the image credits page and in each image's record. Captions are written from the resolved image metadata, and captive, specimen, museum, garden, reserve, research, or historical contexts are disclosed rather than dressed up as wild, in-situ photographs.
No scraping or republishing
FaunaHub does not scrape source websites or republish their text or datasets. It links to sources, summarises in its own words, and reuses only images whose licenses clearly permit it — with attribution intact.
Frequently asked questions
- Which image licenses does FaunaHub use?
- Only licenses that allow commercial use and modification: Public Domain, CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA. These let FaunaHub convert an image to an optimised WebP copy and display it, while preserving the required attribution.
- Why are non-commercial (NC) or no-derivatives (ND) images not used?
- FaunaHub is a commercial-capable website that resizes and converts images to WebP. A no-derivatives (ND) license forbids the conversion, and a non-commercial (NC) license is incompatible with the site, so those images are not used even when they are otherwise excellent.
- How are captive or specimen photos handled?
- Honestly. If an image shows an animal in a zoo, aquarium, museum, garden, reserve, or as a specimen, the caption and risk notes say so, and a 'wild' context is never claimed unless the source supports it.
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