As a part of Centrum Cyfrowe's #NoWorries project funded by EUIPO, I have had the pleasure of enhancing the Creative Commons Wordpress plugin. The new version of CC's Wordpress plugin has a feature called “attribution information for images”. It works like this:

1. you upload an image to the Wordpress Media Library and fill out the correct attribution information there.
2. You then insert the image into a page using the Image Gutenberg block.
3. When the image is then displayed on site, the plugin will show the attribution information – the name of the author, the image's title and link to source, and the CC license used – right there, in a nice semi-transparent overlay over the image.

How does it work?

To find the relevant information from the Media Library, the plugin reuses the information already provided by Gutenberg Image Blocks. Each time an image is inserted using such a block, Wordpress adds a special CSS class to it, in the form of wp-image-{id}, containing the image's identifier in the Media Library. It can be used to add individual styles to a specific image – we're using it to find the relevant entry in the Media Library and add individual attribution information. With this approach, we avoid the need for any custom markup – while also only hitting the database with a query when an actual image from the Media Library is found on the page.

All you need to do is make sure the licensing information is there in the Media Library, and that the images are inserted using the Image block.

This wasn't the first attempt at adding a similar function to the CC Wordpress plugin. The previous attempt used a [license] shortcode wrapping the image – which it's unwieldy with the current Wordpress Gutenberg editor. It also used multiple calls to attachment_url_to_postid to locate the image in the Media Library, which meant executing more database queries for each image. With the new approach, the user doesn't have to change their posts at all – all they need to do is install the plugin and add attribution information in the Media Library, and it will automatically start working for their normally inserted images.

See here how to install the plugin:

See here how to use the image attribution function: