FluPortal.org

If you’re building an H1N1 page for your station — or just hoping to illustrate a swine-flu story — public domain images are fair game. This means you can use any photos created by the government — like these CDC images of the H1N1 virus.

There’s a limited number of government-source pictures, though, so the photo-sharing network Flickr is an excellent alternative and creative resource. Some Flickr photos are copyrighted, but many have some form of a creative-commons license — which allows you to use them freely with attribution. It’s easy to find cc-licensed images: just go to Flickr’s advanced search page, type in your search terms, and click the “only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” box.

If, for example, you use the search term “H1N1,” you get these results. As with anything on the web, there’s lots of dreck. You also have to watch out for images ripped from copyrighted sources like newspapers. But if you dig just a little, you can come up with great original images.

Michael Desmarais from North Carolina, for example, created this collage with some self-portraits:

[Michael Desmarais / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Yann Caradec from Paris captured this public-health message using the Polarize iPhone app:

[y.caradec / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Mat2057, also from Paris (and Toulon), caught this cultural echo at a techno parade in Paris in September.

[mat2057 / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

There’s so much more out there on Flickr — anything from photoshopped creations to images of news coverage to virus checks on a flight from Amsterdam to Shanghai. When we use public-domain or creative-commons photos to illustrate this site, we indicate that they’re usable on yours as well.