One of the recurrent themes of this blog is the inconsistency of licensing in British governmental and parliamentary photographs. Without rehearsing the entire story again, I will note that yesterday I made a wonderful discovery:

Since the day of the event itself I had thought that the only photograph of the 2024 State Opening of Parliament to be released under a free licence was this one of His Majesty in procession through the royal gallery. It is fairly tightly framed, with only the middle ground in focus so that Charles and the page boys to his flanks appear a little too sharp while the Duke of Norfolk in front and the Marchioness of Lansdowne behind are entirely blurred.

The House of Lords Flickr account had a generous album of high quality shots, but these were released under a Non-Commercial and No Derivatives licence, rendering them useless for Wikimedia Commons*. When this happened last year I was able to get around it by using those which had been re-issued under a looser licence by the Oireachtas, although some other Wikipedians challenged the legitimacy of these. No such republication existed this time around.

Happily, yesterday when strolling through the relevant category on Wikimedia Commons I came across a second photograph of the event, taken from inside the upper chamber and showing the speech being read. The source was given as parliament.assetbank-server.com, and the link revealed a page from what seemed to be an official Parliament-owned website with twenty-eight of the forty-five photographs in the Flickr album, but this time very explicitly licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0), which meant they could be used on Wikimedia Commons. Of course, I took the opportunity offered by the handy “DOWNLOAD ALL AS ZIP” button to transfer the lot of them. I had to give new names to all of them as the file originals were mostly gibberish and I noticed that the metadata were inconsistent as well (some had timestamps and others didn’t, some were taken by Roger Harris and others by Annabel Moeller). Some more editing may well be required in future to rectify this.

Though I am reluctant to look this gift horse in the mouth, I am a little perplexed by the existence of this website, which bears the UK Parliament logo but is not at the parliament.uk domain, and whose individual pages can be seen freely once you have the direct link but which cannot be navigated without a login. It could be the case that the majority – or indeed entirety – of the recent House of Lords photograph collection is actually released under a usable licence and these pages would prove it, if only we ever manage to find them.

*The irritating thing about photographing licensing in a parliamentary context is that one must continually differentiate between Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons and the House of Commons. The presence of Their Majesties in these images means that “royalty-free” isn’t very practical either.