Image Credits & Licences

Every photograph on this site comes from Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository run by the Wikimedia Foundation. This page explains what that means in practice and how the licences are honoured.

How images were selected

The licence of each individual image was checked programmatically through the Commons API before the image was included. Only images under licences that permit commercial reuse were kept:

| Licence | What it requires | Images | | ------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------ | ----------------- | | Public domain | Nothing. No rights reserved. | Free to use | | CC0 | Nothing. Rights explicitly waived. | Free to use | | CC BY (1.0–4.0) | Credit the author, name the licence | Attribution shown | | CC BY-SA (1.0–4.0) | Credit the author, name the licence, share adaptations alike | Attribution shown |

Images under any of these were excluded:

• CC BY-NC and any other NonCommercial variant — this site carries advertising, which makes it a commercial use.
• CC BY-ND and any NoDerivatives variant — the images here are resized and re-encoded.
• GFDL-only images, which impose documentation-licence obligations that do not sit sensibly on a web page.
• Fair use / non-free images of any kind.
• Anything whose licence could not be confidently identified. Where the classifier was unsure, the image was dropped rather than guessed at.

A small number of images were additionally excluded because of usage restrictions recorded on Commons, such as trademark or personality-rights notes.

Attribution

Roughly five out of six images on this site are CC BY or CC BY-SA and therefore require a visible credit. Those credits appear directly under the photograph on the card itself, naming the photographer and the licence, and linking back to the file's page on Wikimedia Commons where the full licence terms and revision history live.

Public domain and CC0 images carry no attribution requirement and so show no credit line. That is not an oversight — it is the licence working as intended.

Attribution is generated automatically from the author and licence fields returned by the Commons API. If you are the author of an image and the credit is wrong, missing, or you would like the image removed from the site, write to contact@myanimalgenerator.com and it will be corrected or removed promptly.

Share-alike

Images used under CC BY-SA remain under CC BY-SA. Resized and WebP-converted copies of those images are adaptations and are offered under the same licence as the original. This does not extend to the rest of the site: the written descriptions, the fact cards, the page copy and the software are our own work and are not CC BY-SA.

Species data

Species records — scientific names, taxonomic groups, common names and IUCN Red List status — come from Wikidata, which publishes its content under CC0. No attribution is legally required for CC0 content, but Wikidata and its contributors deserve the credit anyway, so: thank you.

Conservation statuses originate with the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The single-word status shown on a card is a heavy simplification of a detailed assessment. For anything that matters, consult the Red List directly.

Written content

The descriptions and facts on each card were written for this site using Wikipedia summaries as source material, not copied from them. See the about page for how that process works and what its limitations are. That text is our own copyright and is not covered by the image licences above.

Thank you

This site is assembled almost entirely from work donated by other people — photographers who uploaded their pictures under free licences, Wikidata editors who curated taxonomic records, and the volunteers behind the IUCN assessments. None of it would exist otherwise. If you find the site useful, consider supporting Wikimedia.