CC continues to confuse me with so many options. I'd like to use a CC (non-CC0 or public domain) licensed photo as part of my blog template header. Do I really need to put the attribution and link in my template, because that will make my web site look ridiculous.. Any ideas?

Never forget that you can try to contact the creator of the image if you are unclear about such things! If you don't want to have the attribuition in your blog header, shoot them a message and ask if they'd be ok with you putting that in your "About" page or at the bottom of you sidebar or some other such place.

Also, be careful not to remove any license-pertaining metadata from the image.

People I have contacted (unless they are a professional photographer) have been excited that I wanted to use their photo or sound clips. Makes their day, makes my day :)

I bet you can do it in a way that doesn't make your site look ridiculous. Do you have somewhere in a sidebar or footer an about/meta section that has the likes of "powered by wordpress"? That'd be a "reasonable to the medium" place to provide attribution and license notice for a header image, IMO.

Or find a CC0/public domain image to use. One source category https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain or add keywords to search https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASe...

Navigating the (admittedly confusing) CC licenses and figuring out how to place attribution that's both obvious and subtle seem like reasonable prices to pay for using an awesome image for free.

It's just 3 options from the top of my head. Attribution, Non Commercial, No Derivatives. And then any combination of those. I find them very easy to understand, especially compared to some custom licenses I have seen where I have to think hard if I can manage to abide the terms.

Use wordpress? Just install the photodropper plugin.

I'm not associated with the project, I just discovered it last week and it does exactly what I need.

The funny thing is by default Flickr sets all your photos to 'copyright'... and upon realizing this I set out to make all my photos completely copyright free (not even attribution)... but then it turns out you can't even do that. At a minimum you have to have attribution. I'm just happy when people use my photos; I feel bad they have to deal with all this license stuff.

How can I get that transparent inside-the-image attribution that is shown on the first photo in the post?

Inspect the code on that post. :)

Uglier but fully self-contained example http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2012/01/08/css-text-overlay-att...