Image and licensing policy
Where GCI Media images come from, how they are licensed, and how attribution is handled.
Where our images come from
In order of preference: original imagery produced by Global City Intelligence; official institutional imagery where the licence permits reuse; Wikimedia Commons; public domain material; and other clearly compatible Creative Commons work.
What we never use
We do not scrape images. We do not take images from Pinterest, image aggregators, or other blogs. We do not use an image whose licence and creator we cannot establish, and we do not use an image whose licence forbids the use we are making of it.
Attribution
Every image that is not our own carries its creator, its source, its licence and a link to the original. This is enforced in the publishing pipeline: an article whose image lacks that metadata fails validation and cannot be built. Share-alike credit is never stripped, and we do not re-license someone else's work.
Generated imagery
We do not use AI-generated imagery on journalistic or analytical articles. Where a generated diagram or illustration is used to explain a concept — never to depict a real place, person or event — it is labelled as an illustration.
Alt text
Every image carries alt text describing what is actually in the image, written for a reader who cannot see it rather than for a search engine.