Please note that the frequently asked questions will be updated regularly.
Introduction & presentation
Hi! I’m Aymeric, I’m 27 and I live in France.
I used to be a writer for the SCP Foundation, an awesome collaborative writing website dedicated to horror and supernatural content. During my time there, I learnt about the Creative Commons project and used to often spend hours looking for the perfect picture in order to illustrate my articles, as there weren’t any websites dedicated to creepy images.
Fast forward to the present, with the wealth of weird and scary royalty-free pictures that I’ve accumulated but never used, I decided to create this website to share them with the world, and hopefully, inspire artists and supply people with the creepy content that they need, as well as giving the authors of the content the credit that they deserve.
I’m constantly searching and looking for new pictures to extend the CreepyStock galleries, as it is my dream to create the largest online library of creepy pictures on the internet! But, you know, that’s just a dream…
I use the definition as given in the dictionary:
“Creepy” means that something is “strange or unnatural and making you feel frightened. Ex : a creepy film, a creepy smile.“
– The Cambridge dictionary
As you may know, “creepy” is a very personal and subjective feeling. A “creepy” picture can be “gloomy” to someone and “funny” to somebody else. And it is due to this that CreepyStock is about gathering a large amount of rare and weird pictures in the hope of having something for everyone.
Licensing & policy
I’m afraid that this is not possible. Licenses are chosen and applied by the authors. They are NOT interchangeable. You should carefully read and respect the conditions of each license in order to properly use the pictures displayed on CreepyStock galleries.
First, keep in mind that:
“The [Creative Commons] licenses and CC0 cannot be revoked. This means once you apply a CC license to your material, anyone who receives it may rely on that license for as long as the material is protected by copyright, even if you later stop distributing it.”
– About CC Licenses, Creative Commons
Nevertheless, there is an exception. Indeed, moral rights prevail over the Creative Commons licenses. In other words, if you find a personal image hosted on CreepyStock that is likely to cause you harm or distress (e.g.: a picture of yourself when you were a toddler), then I urge you to send me a message, so that I can remove the compromising picture as soon as possible.
Last, but not least, I will obviously remove any pictures that I believe to be falsely uploaded using a wrong license.
There is no difference. “Public domain” and “CC0” pictures refer to the same license.
Some of the Creative Commons images hosted on CreepyStock come from old and abandoned websites which have since been closed, or are inaccessible or unsecure. For the convenience of the website’s users, all links on CreepyStock only lead to active and secure picture libraries such as Wikimedia and Flickr.
Since CreepyStock is not an office of law or an association that specialized in Creative Commons licenses, I won’t be able to help you out with any such questions. I suggest that you have a look at the Creative Commons FAQ, where you might be able to find an answer to your question.
Contribution & bug fixes
Of course! If you have found a bug, a spelling mistake or any incorrect information about a picture, then please let me know by filling in this form. Please remember to send the full URL of the page or file, as I will need it to fix the error. Thank you for your help!
Hell, yes! If you know a good creepy picture that is available under a Creative Commons or another royalty-free license, then please submit it via our dedicated page.
Users can’t upload their own content by themselves to CreepyStock for safety reasons. If someone uploaded illegal content to the website, then CreepyStock could be taken down, and I, as the owner, could face legal issues. To prevent this, users are asked to use the picture submission form so I can manually approve them.
CreepyStock doesn’t generate any revenue by itself, and my other job – I’m professional writer, although not such a successful one – does not pay me enough to pay the bills, therefore, donations are very welcome in helping with the running of the website. Being an online picture library, CreepyStock obviously has some operating costs, and that is why I have started a Ko-Fi webpage.
Thanks to your donations, I will be able to:
– Upgrade the hosting subscription and get a better service provider.
– Buy (a lot of) storage space.
– Purchase and renew the domain name (CreepyStock.com, CreepyStock.org…).
– Extend plugin subscriptions (e.g.: firewall and antivirus software, file management plugin, photo gallery plugin, advanced search plugin, etc…) and purchase new ones.
– Find new pictures among various databases on the internet and add them to CreepyStock (unquestionably the longest and most laborious task);
– Spend more time in adding HTML markups and updating the CSS;
– Have more free time to answer your enquiries and questions!
To sum up, your generosity will help me to get even more involved in the development of CreepyStock.
Miscellanous
No. CreepyStock is an independent image library and is not related in any means to the Creative Commons association.
CreepyStock mainly focuses on eerie and disturbing pictures (e.g.: fishes of the deep, 19th century Halloween costumes and dissected bodies) although most of them come from public places (e.g.: aquariums, cemeteries and museums). However, if you’re easily scared or upset by abnormal content, then I don’t recommend that you to use CreepyStock, or at least make sure that there is someone else next to you if you do.
Some galleries, such as the fishes and wrecks photograph collection or the costumes and family pictures, are less creepy than the others. They are an excellent way to take your very first steps into CreepyStock!
Nope. I suck at logo design so I bought one from iStockPhoto, a professional microstock. Therefore, all rights related to the current CreepyStock logo are the sole property of iStock by Getty Images. Sorry!
Almost all the pictures available on CreepyStock are free-to-use by anyone if the license prerequisites are met. However, the intellectual property of the website and its other components (e.g.: logos, quotes, plugins, coding, etc…) belong to third parties (designers, developers, companies…) or to myself. They do not come under any Creative Commons license and cannot be used without the author’s consent, hence the copyright mention.