Journalism - Finding and Using Images, Maps, Video & Audio: Copyright Free Images

• Google Advanced Image Search
  •   Choose "free to use or share" from the "usage rights" filter.  If you plan to use it commercially, choose "free to use or share, even commercially."
• Burst (from Shopify) provides access to images using the zero Creative Commons license.
• 100+ Free Presentation Tools: Stock Images, Fonts, Clipart and Infographic Sites
• Pikwizard.com offers over 100,000 free stock images, many are photos of people.
• Creative Commons Image Collections Page provides easy access to several media collections.
• Library of Congress Rights Free Images: 
  • John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive
• Flickr Creative Commons provides an easy way to locate shared images based on the type of Creative Commons license that they share

• Behold  searches Flickr photographs using "computer vision" rather than text tag.
  • Limit to "free to use" or "free to modify."

• Compfight a visual search engine. 
  • Limit to "Creative commons" (under "Any license")

• FlickrStorm an image search engine. 
  • Choose "advanced search"
  • Filter by "Search Creative Commons photos

Wylio Searches only Creative Commons content in Flickr. Additional tools for blogs and websites, including resizing tool, photo credit builder, and code generator.

• Wikimedia Commons and Image Usage:
  • Almost all content hosted on Wikimedia Commons may be freely reused subject to certain restrictions in many cases.
    • Content under open content licenses may be reused without any need to contact the licensor.
    • Content in the public domain may not have a strict legal requirement of attribution (depending on the jurisdiction of content reuse), but attribution is recommended to give correct provenance.
  • Verify the copyright status of each image just as you would when obtaining images from other sources.
• Wikipedia's Public domain image resources page provides a growing list of public domain images.

Wikipedia Disclaimer:  "The presence of a resource on this list does not guarantee that all or any of the images in it are in the public domain. You are still responsible for checking the copyright status of images before you submit them to Wikipedia."

Please read the policy on image use and etiquette at: Wikipedia:Image use policy.

There are no copyright restrictions on "public domain" images. The public domain includes images created by government agencies, and works where copyright has expired (those created prior to 1923).

Images posted on the Internet are not necessarily in the the public domain. To find images that you can "reuse":

• Search sites devoted to public domain works

• Find public domain images produced by the Government
  • National Gallery of Art -  view and download high-resolution photos of both paintings, and over 35,000 more from the museum’s vast holdings, through NGA Images, “a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art
• Cultural Institute -  Google houses an enormous digital collection of artwork spanning centuries and continents in what it calls the Art Project
• Getty Open Content Images -  available over 4600 high-resolution images of the museum’s collection freely available in the public domain. You can download them, modify them, distribute them — do what you please with them
• Metropolitan Museum of Art  - more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works in the Museum’s world-renowned collection may be downloaded directly from the Museum’s website for non-commercial use
• The Rijksmuseum - Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art
• Burst on Shopify has collections of public domain images.

Always look for "Terms of Use," "Legal," or copyright statement links on any website, because institutions providing access may still request attribution.

Harvard Guide to finding Public Domain & Creative Commons media