Pickup becomes ball of fire on the southbound Expressway

Both for copyright reasons and simple courtesy.

However, I've long had a shorthand with folks: If you tag a photo as @universalhub on social media, put it in the Universal Hub pool on Flickr or e-mail it to me, then you're giving me permission to post a copy of the photo.

In cases where somebody has not tagged a photo that I might like to run, I'll either ask them, use the particular platform's embed feature (which reproduces the photo and the person's comments exactly as they posted/wrote them), or, sometimes, just link to the photo.

Oh, there's also the case of photos whose users have explicitly given Creative-Commons permission to use them they way I use them, i.e., for posting on a Web site, rather than, say, compiling them into a book and selling that (all those wonderful Leslie Jones photos at the BPL, for example).

The Creative Commons thing is specific to Flickr. A number of years ago, I asked a group of folks who were posting Boston photos on Flickr on a regular basis what they thought of me maybe paying something (given my budget, not much) to folks whose photos I used. The answer I got was basically they'd rather have me continue to give them full credit and to note the photo was copyrighted or used under a particular Creative Commons license. So I always note that on photos I get via Flickr.

Ryan Schulteis tweeted.