Astraware Jigsaw Pictures and Artwork

GORGEOUS ARTWORK

We’re choosing some of the most beautiful pictures that are available to include within Astraware Jigsaw, both for the daily puzzles and for packs of themed puzzles too.

Not only do we want the pictures to play with to be attractive, but they’ve also got to be high quality, varied and interesting, fit well within a grouping, be crop-able to an appropriate shape, and most importantly… make a good jigsaw!

This is harder than you might think – large flat areas of a solid shade or hue tend to be hard to play as jigsaws… and repeating patterns can be fun, but only if they still make it possible to uniquely identify where to place each piece. As with every project involving puzzles, it’s a lot more difficult than you’d imagine at the first step!

ARTWORK CHOICES AND CONTRIBUTORS

We’re currently seeking artwork to use from a range of sources

  • Artwork we’ve created ourselves (either digitally or by photographs)
  • Artwork we’re commissioning from scratch from talented artists
  • Artwork that has been made publicly available by individuals and groups.

We’re making sure that for artwork that has been made publicly available, that we’ve absolutely got the right permission to be able to use it. This means we may use art from sources where there are deliberate and explicit choices to make it freely available to share and use in this kind of a project, i.e.

  • placed in the public domain by various agencies (i.e. NASA)
  • in the public domain from various world libraries (for older items)
  • from individuals who have generously chosen to share their beautiful work

In the case of individuals, we’re only choosing artwork where they have deliberately chosen a sharing level that allows us to use it -to be exact, we’re only including work where the author has specified it can be used under Creative Commons (Free use, or use with attribution, and/or use with alteration).  We are notifying all authors whose work we’d like to use, whether they’ve requested it in particular, or even if they don’t specify to do so (because we think it’s good manners to let them know how we’ll use it!).

If an artist (who has set a piece as freely available) would prefer that we didn’t use their pictures – after all, some people may have chosen “creative commons” by accident, then we won’t include it in our lists, simple as that! (And we’ll happily help them to to adjust the settings on their work for any future enquirers too!)

Providing your work for others to use freely is a very open and generous act – it’s part of the great way the world works! If we’ve notified an author that we’d like to use their work, then we’ll be making sure they can enjoy our Jigsaw game too for free (we’ll find a way to make that work!)

If you’ve found your way to this page because of a link that we’ve sent to you, then welcome, and thanks very much for offering to share your work! Hopefully this will help to explain how it’s likely to be used, so you can let us know that’s OK (or otherwise!)

For every puzzle picture we provide, we will be including lots of information to be available for the player to view – the name of the picture, any comments, the author, and (where possible) a link to their further work.  This is “full attribution” and making sure our contributors are recognised for the awesome work they’ve shared!

If you have pictures you think we should consider for daily puzzles, we now have a Flickr Group set up for Jigsaw Submissions – we’d be delighted to see any pictures you think would be appropriate!

Changing your permissions settings

We’re only aiming to use pictures where we have full permission to do so – and that means selecting pictures where the owner has given deliberate permission for us to use it.

You can check or change the permission settings on photos that you’ve uploaded by going to the page for that image and selecting the dropdown on the right hand side.

Here’s an example pic with the dropdown and arrow circled.

Flickr Permissions

There are a range of different permissions you can set for your picture, from “All Rights Reserved” which means that nobody can use it, through to “Public Domain” which means that anyone can use it in the future for any purpose.

We are only using pictures which have been set to

  • Public Domain
  • Attribution (CC BY) – We are providing full attribution for every picture used
  • Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) – We are providing links back to the original image for others to use
  • Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND) – as we are not changing the original image other than cropping and ‘virtually’ displaying it in small sections.

For every picture we include, we will be including the name and link to the author, and the direct link to the picture, i.e. to Flickr or otherwise, depending on the source.

If you want to make sure that nobody can use your images at all, we advise setting the choice back to the original setting of All Rights Reserved.

For much more explanation see the various levels of license at the Creative Commons Corporation.

We will also be checking every picture again immediately before we use it, in case you have set your picture to any of the Non-Commercial or All Rights Reserved licenses, so if you update your settings we’ll automatically honour that too.