Introducing Mediachain Attribution Engine

The best image search engine for creators. Find free, high quality images that you can share and re-use.

Today, we are excited to announce the official launch of Mediachain Attribution Engine!

Mediachain Attribution Engine lets you:

• Search for free, high quality images that you can share and reuse. We’ve aggregated millions of openly licensed images and used machine learning to surface the best ones.
• Easily give creators the credit they need and deserve. Giving a credit is as simple as copy-and-paste.
• Upload any image from the web to find out who made it and where it came from. If Attribution Engine doesn’t know the creator, it’ll suggest visually similar images that are licensed for re-use and have attribution attached.

In 2016, finding a great image to use in a blog post, presentation, or UI mockup is very easy, but giving the creator proper credit, or even finding out who to credit, is a completely different matter.

At Mediachain Labs, our mission is to connect creators directly to their fans, no matter how or where their creativity is shared. Attribution Engine makes giving the creator credit as easy as copy-and-paste, ensuring they get the recognition they deserve. And, if you stumble upon an image without attribution online, you can use Attribution Engine to upload it and perform a reverse lookup to find out who made it and its source.

Attribution Engine is currently able to identify over 125 Million images from over 30 image sharing platforms. Our goal is to reach 1 billion images in the coming months by inviting creators to register their visual works and partnering with platforms and organizations that support attribution for photographers, artists and the cultural heritage, including Getty Images, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Digital Public Library of America and Europeana.

Attribution Engine is also the first search engine completely powered by open and decentralized data in Mediachain, the open, universal media library we’ve been building since the beginning of the year and notably, it is the first application built on top of Mediachain’s Phase II Architecture. This means that any developer can use the data you see today in their own projects, as well as contribute their favorite dataset directly to Attribution Engine (learn more in the Mediachain 1.0 Developer Update).

Building the best image search engine for creators

People are waiting to find and repost a creator’s great image online, and thousands or even millions of people can end up interacting with the image in no time. When that happens, the creator’s identity often ends up detached from their work.

Earlier this year, we illustrated how Helen Green lost control of her hypnotic animation depicting David Bowie when it went viral across every platform after fans reposted it to celebrate the late musician’s life. Numbers of creators mention experiencing the same problem every single day, indicating of the scale of this problem. Yet, somewhere on the internet the information identifying an image’s creator exists, waiting to be discovered.

We knew that we wouldn’t be able to identify every image on the internet overnight (Google Images hasn’t managed this in 15 years), but we had to start somewhere — and what better fit than with Creative Commons communities.

Creators and organizations who publish works under Creative Commons licenses are giving a tremendous gift, allowing others to share or reuse their work for free. The most popular Creative Commons license simply asks that the creator be credited for their work, but like for all other images, attribution information remains difficult to find.

By aggregating and de-duplicating all of the Creative Commons images from across the web, we’ve come up with a system that makes it really easy to find great images with attribution baked in, ensuring creators receive appropriate gratitude for their generous contributions to the public.

If you find an image on the web and can’t find the author, you can upload it to Mediachain Attribution Engine to try to find out who made it and where it came from—and if it doesn’t know the creator, it’ll suggest visually similar images that do credit the author for your consideration.

In short, it is now really easy to find a great image that you can feel good about sharing!

This is also the first attempt we’re aware of to bring all Creative Commons images under one roof, enabling a much more vibrant and discoverable community for the commons. Most importantly though, this roof sits on top of an open structure.

The network and data powering Mediachain’s Attribution Engine is completely open and decentralized.

That means anyone can download it or contribute to the dataset, all without giving up control to a third party, including Mediachain Labs (find out more in the Mediachain 1.0 Developer Update).

Improving the way we share

Attribution Engine is a major step in helping creators connect with their audiences anywhere their media is shared.

We believe attribution is fundamental to the creative process because it guarantees that creators can connect directly with their fans. Discovery is the biggest hurdle to clear in ensuring that creators can get the attention, gratitude, and (eventually) financial rewards they need to continue to make the great content we see, watch, and listen to every day.

The open source Mediachain protocol is built to power the next generation of social media and application development, where creators and great content are discoverable through an open, decentralized, and universal media library, and audiences can connect, like, upvote, or even tip someone whose work they admire directly through the media itself.

You can contribute to this effort by using Attribution Engine to find beautiful images that reward creators today!

If you make images and want to be discoverable wherever your work is shared, sign up to register your work in Mediachain, and if you’re technical, read our developer update and quick start guide to learn how to contribute information about creative works to Mediachain today.

We’d love your feedback as we strive to grow the best media distribution platform for creators and developers. You can talk to us on Slack, Twitter or by commenting on this post.

If you believe in the attribution revolution, hit the heart button below to help spread the word and tell your friends about Mediachain Attribution Engine!