Credits
Last updated September 10, 2026
Every plant in the BloomsEye library leads with our own illustrated card. Many plants also show real photographs below that card, so you can see the plant as it grows. Those photographs are contributed by naturalists and photographers around the world and shared under open licenses. This page explains where they come from and how they are credited, and where the library's native-range data comes from.
Where the photos come from
The photographs are sourced from open biodiversity and media archives - GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility), Wikimedia Commons, and iNaturalist - and are used only where the photographer released them under a CC0 (public domain) or CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution) license. We do not use photographs that carry a more restrictive license, and we do not use anything marked "no known copyright" without a clear public-domain basis.
How each photo is credited
CC BY asks that the photographer is credited wherever their work appears, and we do that on every photo. On a plant's page, the full credit list sits directly under the photographs, one tap away behind "Photo credits and licenses": it names each photographer, the archive the photo came from, and its license, and links back to the original. Open any photo and its own credit appears again right under the image for as long as you are viewing it. CC0 photos carry the same credit even though the license does not require it, because naming the source is the honest thing to do.
Re-hosting and sizing
To keep pages fast, we re-host a copy of each photograph on our own storage and generate a small thumbnail for the on-page strip; the full-size image loads only when you open a photo. Re-hosting does not change the license: each photo stays governed by its original CC0 or CC BY terms, and the credit travels with it.
Native range data
Where this site says a plant is native to North America, a garden form of a North American native, or native as a group, the claim is read from a published record, never from a tag someone typed. Each plant's record is derived from three published sources under BloomsEye's own rules, with every human decision written to a ledger: the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, licensed CC BY 4.0, range data as of WCVP version 16, June 2026; the USDA NRCS PLANTS Database (USDA, NRCS. The PLANTS Database. National Plant Data Team, Greensboro, NC; read 2026-09-24); and USDA ARS GRIN Taxonomy (USDA, ARS, National Plant Germplasm System; read 2026-09-25). A plant is called native to a place only when two of those authorities agree, and a garden form is never called native outright: it names the wild parent it was bred from.
Contains data from the World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 4.0). Adapted: each plant's native, introduced and split areas are derived from Kew's distribution rows read together with USDA PLANTS and USDA GRIN Taxonomy under the rules of BloomsEye's docs/NATIVE-RANGE-PLAN.md, with human decisions recorded in a ledger; the original data is unchanged at its source.
Corrections and takedowns
If you are a photographer and a credit is wrong, or you believe a photo has been used outside its license, email support@bloomseye.com and we will correct or remove it promptly. The same address takes a native-range correction; each one is read against the sources above and answered on the record.