Introduction:
When you search for photos in Google with the intention of using them in your course materials or in Moodle, you must search for photos that have a reusable licence, that is, ones that the author gives permission for you to use freely. Such photos are accompanied by what is known as a Creative Commons licence, and although there are a variety of Creative Commons licences available, all images which carry this licence must carry an attribution statement wherever they are used. This method ensures that we do not breach any Copyright laws associated with these photos.
When you follow the instructions below, your search results may include images from a variety of sources. The following example is one that uses a photo found via Google in Wikimedia Commons, a great resource for high quality images. Other searches may result in images being found in Wikipedia, Flickr or other sources, and the instructions, whilst different, are essentially the same - save the photo, then find the attribution statement and copy and paste it into your materials below the photo.
If there is no visible attribution statement like the example provided below, somewhere near the photo there should be a link to the Creative Commons licence associated with the photo, so you will need to provide a link to that licence information and the name of the author in your materials. For example, photos that are associated with the Creative Commons ShareALike licence (the most common one) should provide a link to the licence page as well as the author's name and the location of the photo, eg By Victor Ujin (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Flickr. This text should be placed below the photo as in the example below.
Steps:
1. Go to Google and type in your search terms, then click on 'Images'.
2. Click on the 'Search tools' button to refine your search.
3. Change the 'Usage rights' option to 'Labeled for noncommercial reuse' and the 'Size' to 'Large' (if you want high quality images that is; if not, just leave it as is).
4. Single left-click on an image you like, and then click on the 'Visit page' button.
5. Above, below or beside the photo you have chosen, you will see a button that looks like this, so click on it:
6. In the window that pops up, click on the size of the photo you want to save using the 'Download image file' links. Then copy the text in the 'Attribution' box, and paste it below the photo in your materials or in Moodle.
Here is an example of how this might look like:
By Schnobby (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons