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PowerPoint Stock Images

Anonymous
2020-06-08T19:55:49+00:00

How do I determine where the PowerPoint Stock Images come from and how to credit them. There are three options for adding a photo: 

  • This Device is from my own computer.
  • Online Pictures allows me to search via Creative Commons and then once inserted, right click and select "view source" to double check the license. 
  • Stock Images does not have a Creative Commons option or the "view source" option once inserted. 

Where do these photos come from and how do I cite them? Or how do I double check they're not a copyrighted image?

Thanks,

Microsoft 365 and Office | PowerPoint | For home | Windows

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  1. Steve Rindsberg 99,156 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2020-06-09T16:02:06+00:00

    Stock Images is a new feature; the images are licensed by Microsoft from (as you've found) Getty, and possibly other sources, to be offered to PPT users in their presentations.

    Most of us here are not MS employees and none of us is an MS attorney, but some of us have asked these same questions of the people at MS who developed this feature.

    The general advice is that you can use the stock images in your presentations and use the presentations in pretty much any way you like, including ways that produce revenue. You cannot, however, sell the images AS images.

    As you already understand, the creative commons images are another matter; for those you'd have to check the licensing individually.

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-06-09T04:35:49+00:00

    Hi captainboo42,

    Thank you for your message in this forum.

    According to your description, it seems that you want to know where the PowerPoint Stock Images come from and how to credit them.

    If so, as John mentioned, generally, you can trust that they are being accurate. You can search and insert high quality professional stock imagery from places like Getty and iStock in Stock images, there is no cost to you. Microsoft doesn’t tag the images with their origin, but a little reverse image searching reveals that you can use a particular image without cost.

    We understand that you want to determine easily where the "Stock Images" come from, however, we’re afraid that there is no out of box way to achieve your requirement easily. We’re sorry that it doesn’t meet your requirement. I do understand the inconvenience it has made and apologize for it.

    To address your concern about the situation, we’d suggest you go to PowerPoint Uservoice to provide your feedback. This is the best platform to let us hear from you and make our products and services better for you and others. Or you can also provide feedback to our related team by clicking on the Smiley Face button inside PowerPoint. This feedback will directly go to them so that our related team can hear your voice on this feature directly.

    Your understanding and patience will be highly appreciated.

    Best Regards,

    Sukie

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-06-08T21:11:31+00:00

    Right, I get that for the Online Search option but there's no way to determine easily where the "Stock Images..." come from and since there's no wordmark on it, it implies the image is free to use. I just did a reverse image search on one of the images and it came up in Getty Images. I'm just not going to use these since they appear to be from paid sites. 

    Thank you.

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  3. John Korchok 231.5K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2020-06-08T21:02:19+00:00

    Microsoft has decided to "disintermediate" themselves from the process of determining if online picture usage by their users is legal or not. If an image has been tagged by the host site as being Creative Commons, then you're unlikely to find any information to contradict that on the host site. You just have to trust that they're being accurate.

    Stock Images always have licensing terms that are specified on the host site, so that's straightforward.

    The trickiest option is if you search for online images, but uncheck the Creative Commons option. Then you may not know, or be able to find, the legal status of found images. You would have to contact the host site to find out what their terms might be.

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