Photography, image use and credits policy

The kinds of image on this site

Every image on Tamu Borneo is one of three kinds, and the page says which:

• Licensed photographs from Wikimedia Commons, used under the licence their authors chose: CC0, public domain, CC BY or CC BY-SA. None are in use at the moment; the earlier ones were replaced by illustrations.
• Generated illustrations — artwork made with AI image tools. They are never presented as photographs of a real tamu, trader or product.
• Original photographs taken for Tamu Borneo. None are published yet; when they are, they will be marked as our own and credited.

How images are labelled

On listings, a photo of the market itself is labelled “Photo of this tamu”, and generated artwork is labelled “Illustration — generated artwork”. Where we have no photo of a tamu, we may show a photo of its town or district instead; its caption says what it shows, and it is never presented as the market. Alt text describes what is actually in the frame. Purely decorative backgrounds have empty alt text so screen readers skip them.

Credits and licences

The author, licence and source link for every photograph are listed on the image credits page, linked from the footer of every page. We crop photos to 3:2 and resize and convert them for the web; adapted CC BY-SA photos are shared under the same licence. To reuse one of these photos, follow the licence on its Wikimedia Commons page.

What we do not use

We publish a third-party image only when a licence or written permission allows it. Being publicly online is not permission: we do not use photographs from other websites — including the Sabah Tourism Board’s — without it. We do not hotlink images, remove watermarks, or recreate an existing photograph to disguise where it came from.

Generated illustrations

Illustrations are made from written descriptions, not by copying photographs. They show general market scenes and food, not a specific named tamu or real people, and they are labelled wherever they stand in for a photo. We do not claim that they are photographs, or that they cannot be recognised as AI-generated. The current illustrations were generated from written briefs built from our cited listings, food guides and district summaries. Public photographs, including the Sabah Tourism Board’s, were looked at only as research into what tamu, stalls and goods look like; none was copied, traced or given to the image tool.

Maps

Map tiles and district boundaries are © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). The simplified district outlines on the district map are shared under the same licence.

Reusing Tamu Borneo’s own content

The terms for reusing the site’s own text and illustrations have not been published yet. Please ask before reusing them.

Report an image concern

If you hold rights in an image here, or think one is labelled or credited wrongly, use the Suggest an update form. Name the page and the image and explain the problem. We will review it and correct the credit or remove the image where that is warranted.