Image Policy and You!
Our wiki is a creative community that operates on a Creative Commons Share-Alike Attributive (CC-BY-SA) license. Creative Commons means that you have a lot (but not total) freedom to use the SCP Foundation format, characters, and objects, pretty however way you want.
For the purposes of this guide, one of the most important things to know is that you should use images that are compatible with our specific Creative Commons license. There are a few reasons for this.
First of all, randomly “borrowing” images from across the internet is a recipe for disaster. While most of the people who have learned that we have “borrowed” their work have been quite gracious, there’s no guarantee that they will be. The internet is littered with examples of authors and sites being sued into the ground for unauthorized use of copyrighted material. Don’t be one of those authors.
Second, it’s the right thing to do. You wouldn’t want someone to take something you had made and use it in their work without giving you any credit, would you? By releasing their work under CC-BY-SA, a creator implicitly gives permission for anyone to reuse and remix their work, so long as the work is also CC-BY-SA, and the original creator is properly credited.
Third, it makes it much easier for fans and other people to remix and reuse your work. Everything written on this website is, by default, CC-BY-SA. If the images for an article are under a different license, or are someone else’s copyrighted material, it makes things needlessly complicated for everyone.
Fourth and most straightforward: it’s the dang site policy.
Okay, So Where Can I Find CC-compatible images?
Fortunately, there are a bunch of places where you can find CC or public domain images! For starters, there is:
Pexels, which offers hundreds of thousands of free stock photographs under a CC-BY-SA-compatible license.
Snappygoat ditto.
Wikimedia Commons, with literally tens of millions of files available for use (note: not all images are under licenses that are CC-BY-SA compatible; be sure to check the usage details for each image)0
Flickr, which allows you to search broadly by license from hundreds of thousands of photographs.
Google Image Search, where you can search by very broad license type (note: don’t just assume that because something shows up here, it is CC-BY-SA compatible; check!)
So, I found this really cool image! I hope that it's CC or public domain or whatever. How can I be sure that it is?
If you're not sure whether an image is CC-compatible, then fire up tineye or Reverse Google Image Search (click on the camera to the right of the search bar). If one of the links shows that either it's CC-BY-SA compatible, then you're good to go!
If you have any questions about resources, licenses, or anything else relating on how to use images on the wiki, feel free to post them below!
To read more the specifics of our license, feel free to check out the licensing guide, or the summary of the license.
