Library Guides: Find Images: Beyond CSM

Creative Commons Image Sites

These are some sources for images to use within your own projects. While most of these databases are meant to provide freely usable images, please check the exact licensing restrictions carefully.

Clker.com: Free clip art

Royalty-free, public domain, vector clip art
Compfight

Compfight is an image search engine tailored to efficiently locate images for blogs, comps, inspiration, and research.
Flickr Creative Commons

Flickr users can opt to use a creative commons license to share their work with others.
FreeImages

A collection of free stock photos.
Getty Open Images

Images of works in the J. Paul Getty Museum. The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.
Morguefile

A post production file, over 350,000 free stock photos for commercial use.
Pixabay

Over 830,000 free stock photos, vectors and art illustrations.
Unsplash

Free, HD photos
Wellcome Images

Wellcome Images is one of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.
Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content including images, sound and video clips.

Image Collections by Topic

Denver Art Museum
Explore a selection of objects from their collections by: culture, locale, country or medium.

Getty Search Gateway This link opens in a new window
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Currently, there are more than 180,000 images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute available through the Open Content Program. The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.

Google Arts & Culture
Discover artworks, collections and stories from all around the world in a new way. Explore cultural treasures in extraordinary detail and easily share with your friends.
Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey
The collections, from the Library of Congress, document achievements in architecture, engineering, and landscape design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types, engineering technologies, and landscapes
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Over 20,000 images. Go nuts!
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Everything from baseball cards to watercolors.
MoMA: Museum of Modern Art
More than 72,000 works are currently available online.
National Museum of the American Indian
The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) has one of the most extensive collections of Native American arts and artifacts in the world.
National Portrait Gallery
Featuring scientists, statesmen, and film stars, glimpsed through rare nineteenth-century daguerreotypes or year-old digital video, the National Portrait Gallery collections bring you face to face with America.
Victoria and Albert Museum
From "the world’s greatest museum of art and design."

Linda Hall Library Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
Nearly a quarter million digitized images from the History of Science Collection offer researchers the opportunity to view such items as books, maps, photographs, and manuscripts.

CalPhotos
CalPhotos is a collection of over 560,000 photos of plants, animals, fossils, people, and landscapes from around the world. A variety of organizations and individuals have contributed photographs to CalPhotos. Please be aware that these various contributors maintain copyright and follow the usage guidelines provided with each image.
David Rumsey Map Collection
A historical map collection of over 73,000 maps focusing on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia, and Africa are also represented.
Government Resources for Science Images
Site for copyright free U.S. Government science images.
NASA Images
Public access to NASA's image, video, and audio collections in a single, searchable resource.
NIH Flickr site
National Institutes of Health health research images, b-roll, infographics, and videos.
NOAA Photo Library
The NOAA Photo Library has been built so as to capture the work, observations, and studies that are carried on by the scientists, engineers, commissioned officers, and administrative personnel that make up this complex and scientifically diverse agency.
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library
Ongoing scanning project of the center’s 200,000 historical maps and 5,000 atlases.
Public Health Image Library (PHIL)
Offers an organized, universal electronic gateway to CDC's pictures.
Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum
The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum maintains the world's largest and most significant collection of aviation and space artifacts, encompassing all aspects of human flight, as well as related works of art and archival materials.
U.S. Department of Agriculture Image Gallery
This Image Gallery is provided as a complimentary source of high-quality digital photographs available from the Agricultural Research Service Office of Communications.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: National Digital Library
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Digital Library is a searchable collection of selected images, historical artifacts, audio clips, publications, and video, most of which are in the public domain.
USGS Denver Library Photographic Collection
The Photographic Collection is an archive of more than 500,000 still photographs, slides, glass plate slides, lantern slides, negatives, and sketches dating from the 1870s and taken by USGS scientists as part of their field studies. The images and photographers involved with this collection span a variety of styles, locations, and time periods. Subjects include earthquakes, volcanoes, geologic formations, minerals, historical mining operations, national parks, USGS portraits, and other photographs of historic and earth science events.

Ad*Access This link opens in a new window
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Over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements from 1911-1955 covering five product categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda.
Linda Hall Library Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
Nearly a quarter million digitized images from the History of Science Collection offer researchers the opportunity to view such items as books, maps, photographs, and manuscripts.

CalPhotos
CalPhotos is a collection of over 560,000 photos of plants, animals, fossils, people, and landscapes from around the world. A variety of organizations and individuals have contributed photographs to CalPhotos. Please be aware that these various contributors maintain copyright and follow the usage guidelines provided with each image.
Center for Military History: Photographs
Photos covering major battles and wars with U.S. Military involvement.
Civil War Photos
Over 1,000 Civil War Images, Civil War Photographs and Cartes de Visites
Free Historical Stock Photos
Offers a wide range of subjects.
Google Arts & Culture
Discover artworks, collections and stories from all around the world in a new way. Explore cultural treasures in extraordinary detail and easily share with your friends.
Life Photo Archive
A digital collection of millions of photographs from LIFE magazine from 1750s to today.
National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives
Their collections represent the four fields of anthropology – ethnology, linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology – and include fieldnotes, journals, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, maps, sound recordings, film and video created by Smithsonian anthropologists and other preeminent scholars.
National Museum of the American Indian
The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) has one of the most extensive collections of Native American arts and artifacts in the world.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons helps creators share their work. With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit -- and only on specificed conditions (e.g. non-commercial, non-derivative, share-alike).

How to Give Creative Commons Attribution

Here is a photo. Following it are some examples of how people might attribute it.

This is an ideal attribution

“Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco” by tvol is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Because:

Title? “Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco”
Author? “tvol” – linked to his profile page
Source? “Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco” – linked to original Flickr page
License? “CC BY 2.0” – linked to license deed

How you attribute authors of the CC works will depend on whether you modify the content, if you create a derivative, if there are multiple sources, etc. Find out more about attribution on the CC Wiki.