Sharing images

The most rewarding moments online for me is when someone uses my work. In the case of images, to aid this process I’ve licensed my images as liberally as possible with Flickr.

Last week a Wikipedia contributor contacted me about some pictures I took of King Sejong the Great of Joseon’s grave. He encouraged me to visit more museums and take more pictures for Wikipedia articles of Korean history featuring the Three kingdoms era. I did just that last weekend and I must say I’ve never so enthusiastically visited a museum before. Not only did I take a bunch of pictures of various artifacts, I learnt far more than usual and I even took notes. Wow.

Here is a small sample of the images that have been used by Wikipedia:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-Branched_Sword
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_King_Muryeong
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Sejong_tomb_1.jpg

Now I wish this process was a little better.

If the Wikipedia contributor didn’t mail me, how would I know he used my pictures?

I don’t consider Flickr to be my central image store and I have tons of pictures that are public domain in my own image gallery system.

I wonder how I should license/tag/meta my pictures so that search engines (Google) know they’re in the public domain and people can find them.