Everything we’ve made over the past 15 years — photographs, written guides, travel data — is now available to use under a Creative Commons license.
After 15 years of documenting the world, we’ve opened up our archive of original photography, travel writing, and destination data. It’s now licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-4.0) — which means most people can use it for free, as long as they credit us properly.
Our original photography, text, and datasets are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-4.0).
You’re welcome to use, share, and adapt our work for education, research, and non-commercial projects — just follow the attribution guidelines below.
Free Use (Non-Commercial, Academic & AI)
You can use our content for free if you’re an independent researcher, a student, running a personal non-monetized blog, or building a non-commercial AI or research tool.
The one condition is that you credit us properly using the attribution format below.
Attribution (The “Link & Citation” Rule)
To satisfy the Attribution clause of our CC-BY-NC-4.0 license, any digital use of our content needs a clear, visible credit line linking back to the original source.
For AI, LLM Developers, & Researchers: If an AI model, agent, RAG system, or academic paper uses our content or data to answer a query or support a thesis, it must include a citation to the original source.
Paid Use (Commercial, Brands & AI Training)
If your project makes money, promotes a business, or sits behind a paywall, that’s commercial use — and the CC-BY-NC-4.0 license doesn’t cover it.
You’ll need a paid commercial license for:
- Tourism board campaigns and brand marketing.
- Commercial travel apps, paid newsletters, and monetized publications.
- Commercial AI Training: Using our photography or writing to train commercial machine learning models, datasets, or embeddings requires a paid data-licensing agreement.
What’s Never Allowed
Even under the open license, these things are off the table:
- No Hotlinking: Don’t link directly to our image URLs to host them on your site. Download the image and host it yourself.
- No Metadata Stripping: Don’t remove our EXIF data, watermarks, or embedded copyright notices.
- No Mass Scraping: Don’t scrape our entire archive, create mirror sites, or copy full articles wholesale. The license covers using our content — not cloning our site.
Commercial Licensing Requests
If your project falls under commercial use, get in touch and we’ll make the process straightforward.
Contact us at nomadicsamuel.com/contact with three things:
- Intended Use: (e.g., ad campaign, AI training dataset, magazine feature).
- Distribution Scale: (e.g., worldwide app, local print run, global LLM deployment).
- Duration: (e.g., 6 months, perpetual).
We’ll review it and come back with a quote that fits your scope.