Answer 06 of 12
Do you have to credit this nature photography? – Affordable Nature Photography
No credit is required anywhere. Where writing one still helps you, and what a credit does not do.
No. Attribution is not required for any use the licence permits. Not on a website, not in print, not on packaging, not in an advertisement.
Requiring a credit line on an image destined for a product label is a rule nobody could follow, and a rule nobody follows is worse than none.
Where a credit is still worth writing
Editorial pages. Most publications credit every photograph as house style. Following it keeps the picture desk happy and makes the layout look finished.
Location captions. For landscape work, the place is usually more interesting to a reader than the source. Where an image page documents a location, naming it is genuinely useful content rather than a formality.
Your own asset records. The most valuable credit is the invisible one. Put the asset id into the layout file, the DAM record or the job notes. When somebody asks in a year whether the ridge on page four is cleared, the answer takes ten seconds.
Format
Keep it short and factual, and lead with the place:
Morning fog, Wye Valley — valleynaturephotos.site
Naming the site is optional. Naming the valley is the part a reader might want.
What a credit is not
A credit does not extend the licence. Naming the source does not turn a prohibited use into a permitted one, does not substitute for buying a licence, and creates no right to redistribute the file.
Nor may a credit imply endorsement. Using a photograph from this catalogue does not mean this site has reviewed, approved or is associated with your product or claim.
Accuracy in captions
If you name a location, use the one recorded on the image page. Where none is recorded, none was documented, and inventing one is how errors enter print and then get repeated by whoever reads your page next.
If you know a location is wrong, tell us. Geographic corrections are acted on quickly, because a wrong place name in a catalogue propagates into other people's work.
Alt text
The one piece of writing that is genuinely required, though not by us: an image on a web page needs alt text, and a credit is not alt text.
Describe what is in the picture for someone who cannot see it. "Fog filling a steep wooded valley at sunrise" is useful. "Nature photography" is not, and neither is the file name. The description on each image page is written to be usable as a starting point for exactly this, and you are welcome to take it.
Decorative images that carry no information should have empty alt text rather than a description.