Give credit [July 24, 2012, 6:03 a.m.]
Some questions to ask yourself:
- Where did you find the photo? eg. a website URL
- Who owns the photo? eg. a Flickr user
- What terms of use and/or license is the photo under? Are there specific attribution requirements laid out in the terms or license? eg. All CC licenses require that you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). CC licenses also require that all copyright notices remain intact, including notice of the license or link to the license URL, eg. URL for CC BY license is http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0.
There are many ways to give credit. If you are using a CC licensed photo, some best practices for marking content exist at the CC wiki: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking/Users. You can also help improve these best practices at the wiki's Talk page: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/index.php?title=Talk:Marking/Users&action=edit&redlink=1
Here is an example of a decent attribution:
"My Awesome Photo," © 2009 Greg Grossmeier, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
You can also see how photo attribution looks as part of an actual blog post at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33041.