Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Images

Open Image Resources

Artstor Images for Academic Publishing (IAP)
The Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program makes available publication-quality images for use in scholarly publications free of charge.
Creative Commons Image Directories
(Terms: CC and public domain)
Creative Commons Search
Search across several repositories, including YouTube, Google, SoundCloud, and more, for still images, music, and videos.
EDUimages by All4Ed
EDUimages is a free library of photos celebrating students—and the educators who teach them—in seven schools across the United States. Attribution—You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
Figshare
figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner. (Terms: CC-BY Licensed) research-related images, data etc.
Flickr: Creative Commons
Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.
Flickr Commons
Since launching in 2008 with the Library of Congress, the Flickr Commons has been sharing hidden treasures from the world’s photography archives, with over 100 members.
Free Images
We have millions of photos, illustrations, vector graphics, clipart, icons, and Photoshop files that you can download for free.
Freepik
Turn ideas into outstanding designs with high-quality vectors, photos, videos, mockups, and more. Attribution Required.
Getty Open Content Program
The Open Content Program makes high-resolution images of public domain artwork from the Getty collections freely available, without restrictions, to advance the research, teaching, and practice of art and art history.
Google Advanced Image Search
Set usage rights: to Creative Commons licenses (found at the bottom)
Magdeleine
Free high-resolution stock images licensed with CC0, Public Domain, and Creative Commons Attribution.
mojeek
searches Pixabay and Openverse
Noun Project
search CC-licensed and public domain icons and photos by keyword
NYPL Digital Collections
Explore 863,601 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections.
Old Book Illustrations
Old Book Illustrations was born of the desire to share illustrations from a modest collection of books, which we set out to scan and publish. With the wealth of resources available online, it became increasingly difficult to resist the temptation to explore other collections and include these images along with our own.
Open Peeps
A hand-drawn illustration library. The library is in the public domain under the CC0 License.
openverse
Explore more than 700 million creative works An extensive library of free stock photos, images, and audio, available for free use.All Openverse content is under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.
Pexels
Pexels is a free stock photo and video website and app that helps designers, bloggers, and everyone who is looking for visuals to find great photos and videos that can be downloaded and used for free. No attribution is required.
pixabay
Stunning royalty-free images & royalty-free stock. Over 4.1 million+ high-quality stock images, videos, and music. No attribution is required.
Pond5 Free Stock Videos, Photos, and Music
Thousands of audio, image, and video files in the public domain from the collection of the Pond5 stock footage company.
Public Domain Pictures
Public Domain Pictures includes lots of high-quality free public domain images, although some photos are only available with a premium membership to the site.
Smithsonian Open Access
Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 4.5 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come.
TinEye Multicolr: Search by color
"We used MulticolorEngine to extract the colors from 20 million Creative Commons images on Flickr to make the images searchable by color. Enjoy!"
U.S. Government Photos and Images
A vast collection of photos and images from the U.S. Government, many of which are in the public domain and free to use.
Unsplash
"Over 3 million free high-resolution images brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers." No attribution required.
Vecteezy
Vecteezy is an online marketplace where users can license stock photos, vector graphics, and stock footage from artists. Basic features are free but include ads and limitations. Pro subscribers get advanced licensing and a more comprehensive selection of content. (Terms: CC and Commercial)
Vintage Stock Photos
"Our vintage images may be used in commercial projects like websites, advertising, books, videos, and other commercial presentations. If you can give credit to the site, we certainly appreciate it, but credit is NOT required. "
Wellcome Images
Providing access to the visual collections of the Wellcome Library, which documents "2000 years of human culture" with a focus on biomedical imagery. Most images are open access, with others available for paid licensing.
Wikimedia Commons
a collection of 97,552,674 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute

Creating Required Attributions for using Openly-Licensed Works

Reusing works that have a Creative Commons license ALWAYS requires attribution.

Learn how to attribute CC-licensed works by following these best practices.

The most common forms of attribution include the three elements, two of which are hyperlinked:

(c) Author Name "Name of work [hyperlinked to where you found the work]" License [hyperlinked to license]

For example:

License terms on some sites (this one is from Flickr.com) may appear as Creative Commons icons or appear when a hyperlink is moused over.