The task of finding images free to use on the Internet with proper attribution has become easier, thanks to the blockchain-based Mediachain Attribution Engine, which has aggregated millions of openly licensed images.

By using machine learning to find the best images, Attribution Engine has launched a platform that allows users to upload any image from the web and find out who made it and where it came from. If Attribution Engine does not know the image’s creator, it suggests similar images licensed for reuse that have attribution.

An Open Media Library

Attribution Engine is the first search engine powered by Mediachain, an open media library built on blockchain-based technology. Any developer can contribute their dataset to Attribution Engine.

Attribution Engine can now identify more than 125 million images from more than 30 image sharing platforms. The goal is to have 1 billion images by encouraging creators to register their visual works. Attribution Engine will partner with organizations that attribute artists and photographers, organizations such as the Digital Public Library of America, the Museum of Modern Art and Europena.

Finding a good image for a presentation, blog or user interface post is one thing. Giving proper credit has long been a challenge.

Copy And Paste

Mediachain Labs connects creators to fans. Crediting an image with Attribution Engine is as simple as copy-and-paste.

Users who find an image without attribution can conduct a reverse lookup to find the source using Attribution Engine.

Attribution Engine will help image creators get the credit that often gets lost as thousands and even millions of people interact with images on the Internet.

For example, artist Helen Green lost control of her animation of David Bowie when fans posted it to celebrate the musician’s life. The problem confronts image creators daily, yet the attribution image exists somewhere on the Internet and is waiting to be discovered.

Also read: Protecting rights to digital works with bitcoin technology

First Partner: Creative Commons

Mediachain’s first partner is Creative Commons, a community of creators that which allow fans to reuse their work for free. The most common Creative Commons license asks that the creator gets credit for their work.

Attribution Engine has aggregated and re-duplicated all Creative Commons images. It has developed a system for finding images with the attribution “baked in.”

Anyone can contribute to the dataset without giving up control to a third party, including Mediachain Labs.

Attribution of creative work is important to the creative process since it assures creators can connect directly to their fans.

The open source Mediachain protocol is built to support the next generation of social media and application development.

Creators who want to have their images discovered and shared can register their work in Mediachain.

Mediachain was launched using the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a “hypermedia distribution protocol,” to protect rights to digital works. Other blockchain-based authentication systems use an encoded ID to reference centrally-hosted data, but these have limited storage per transaction.

Images from Mediachain.