The rule
Every image on this site is fetched from Wikimedia Commons, and every candidate is judged on
its own extmetadata before it is downloaded. If the licence field is missing,
unreadable, or names anything other than public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, the file is
skipped. It is never downloaded, so it can never be published by accident.
This Atlas does not assume that a file on Commons is free to use. That assumption is the single most common way reference sites end up infringing.
What is stored for every image
The database refuses an image record without a licence and a source URL. Each one carries: the file path, the media type, the title, the caption as written by the source, the alt text, what it depicts, the creator, the source (Wikimedia Commons), the file page URL, the licence, the licence URL, the exact attribution line where one is required, the dimensions, and the date it was retrieved.
Attribution-required licences are accepted precisely because that credit line is rendered under every image and in the lightbox, linked to both the licence text and the original file page. Public domain and CC0 files are preferred and rank first.
What is excluded, and why
- Files whose licence cannot be read.
- Files carrying a restrictions notice — typically trademark or personality-rights warnings.
- Non-commercial or no-derivatives variants.
- Coats of arms, flags, logos, seals, stamps, banknotes and emblems.
- Maps, diagrams, charts and screenshots, which are handled as data rather than photography.
- Anything below 800 × 500 pixels, and extreme panoramas that crop dishonestly in a card.
Nothing is scraped from Google Images, TripAdvisor, travel blogs, news sites, hotel sites, estate agents or social media. Unsplash and Pexels are not used.
Photographs, and things that are not photographs
Commons holds a great deal of pre-photographic material, and some of it is valuable — an 1851 view of Gjirokastër by Edward Lear belongs on a history page. It must never be presented as a photograph of the place today. Every image is classified and labelled: Photograph, Aerial photograph, Painting, Engraving, Lithograph, Drawing, Postcard or Historical view. The label appears on the caption whenever the image is not a plain photograph.
Section banners
Every banner on this site — the homepage, each section, each guide, each data series, each policy page — is a real photograph taken in Albania, carrying the same creator, licence and source link as any other photograph here. An earlier version of the Atlas used commissioned illustration for these slots; that was the wrong call for a country reference site, and it was replaced. A reader who opens a page about Albania should see Albania.
A banner must be a photograph. Paintings, engravings, postcards and historical views are welcome further down a page, where the caption names them for what they are, but they are never used as the image that introduces a subject. Where a page covers something that cannot be photographed — a data series, or the Ask feature — the banner is a real Albanian scene and the caption says plainly what it shows rather than pretending to illustrate an abstraction.
There is no AI-generated imagery anywhere on this site.
If you are the rights holder
If an image here is misattributed, mislicensed, or you would like it removed, use the correction form on the page it appears on, or the contact page. Say which image and what is wrong, and it will be corrected or taken down.
Maps
Boundary geometry is from geoBoundaries (gbOpen ALB ADM1, public domain) and is rendered as SVG by this site. No proprietary map tiles are copied or cached. Where a page offers a zoomable map it links out to OpenStreetMap with its attribution intact.