My earlier post about Common Craft’s new video prompted a few people to ask me for recommendations for places to find public domain images and videos. Here are the three places that I go to when I need public domain images.
Pixabay hosts high quality public domain images. You can search on Pixabay by using keywords or you can simply browse through the library of images. When you find a Pixabay image you can download it in the size that suits your needs. Registered users do not have to enter a captcha code to download images. Users who do not register can download images, but they do have to enter a captcha code before downloading each picture. Pixabay has a “safe search” filter that I recommend activating before searching.
Flickr’s The Commons hosts images from libraries and museums around the world. You can search The Commons by topic or by searching for a specific type of image.
Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons can be good places to find images that are in the public domain as well as images that have Creative Common licenses. I haven’t found a great way to search for images on Wikipedia and Wikimedia so I just enter a search for a topic, person, or place and then scroll through the page to look for an image. It’s not the most efficient process, but it works for me. Just make sure that you check the licensing statement on the image before you re-use it.
