Finding licence-clear photographs past the stock picks

`osy photo find` searches Openverse — openly licensed photographs, no key needed — under several wordings of the subject, skips the top results everyone else takes, keeps one picture per photographer and shows each one's licence. `--take` downloads the ones you chose into `model/textures/` and appends their credit to `CREDITS.md`.

Summary#

Anything people look at in an app — a hero, a product, a place — wants a real photograph, shipped with the app and credited. osy photo find finds candidates whose licence lets an app use and crop them, past the handful of pictures every other site already used, and --take brings the ones you chose into the project with their credit line written.

Signature#

osy photo find "<subject>" [--skip <n>] [--json]
osy photo find "<subject>" --take 2,5 [--name <stem>]

Description#

Searching#

Name what the picture SHOWS. The subject is searched four ways — as written, as a detail, with people in it, and as an interior — so the list is not one photographer's answer to one query. In each, the top three results are skipped (--skip changes it): they are the stock picks a hundred sites share. Then one picture per photographer is kept — ten frames from one shoot are one look, not ten choices — and anything whose long side is under 1000px is left out.

$ osy photo find "harbour at dusk"
Photographs of "harbour at dusk" — Openverse, licence-clear for an app; the top 3 of each wording skipped, one per photographer
   1 Harbour lights — … · CC BY 2.0 · 1024×683 · https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
   2 … — … · CC0 (public domain) · 1600×1067 · https://commons.wikimedia.org/…
   …
Next: open the ones that might fit, then `osy photo find "harbour at dusk" --take 2,5` — into model/textures/, credited in CREDITS.md.

Every candidate carries its licence. Only licences that allow commercial use AND changes are asked for (CC0, public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA): an app crops, and a no-derivatives licence does not cover that.

Taking them#

--take names the candidates by the numbers the list printed. Each is downloaded to model/textures/<stem>_<n>.jpg — the folder a Textures.<Name> reads ([[ui-image#texture]]) — and a line is appended to CREDITS.md:

$ osy photo find "harbour at dusk" --take 2
✓ model/textures/harbour_at_dusk_1.jpg — "…" by …, https://…, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
Credited in CREDITS.md. OPEN each file before using it — a title can say what the picture is not.

--name sets the stem (letters, digits and _ — the texture name is made from it). Open every file before you use it: a title is the uploader's words, not a description. A CC BY or BY-SA picture must be credited where the app is seen as well — an about page or a footer line from CREDITS.md does it.

Why Openverse#

Openverse is an open catalogue of openly licensed media (Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, museums and more) with a public API that needs no key, and it states the licence and the author of every result — which is what an app shipping a picture needs to know. Without a network the verb says so and writes nothing.