Personal Development 115: Finding Images

Provides access to millions of images, texts, videos, and sounds from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the United States.

Provides free online access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.

Contains over a million images from copyright-free books from the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries.

Images Online gives you instant access to thousands of the greatest images from the British Library's vast collections.

Contains over 700,000 items from NYPL.

Contains over 8.1 million cataloged items relating to Art, Design, History, Culture, Science, and Technology, with 860,477 images, videos, audio files, podcasts, blog posts and electronic journals available.

Allows searching collections by object, date, or subject. Tip limit your search to "show public domain images only."

Provides free access to a growing number of digitized items from the Research Library, Special Collections, Photo Archive, and Institutional Archives. These materials range from the 15th century to the present and include books, photographs, manuscripts, archives, and works on paper.

One of the first and largest collections relating to the Bauhaus, the 20th century’s most influential school of art and design. Active during the years of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919–33), the Bauhaus aimed to unite artists, architects, and craftsmen in the utopian project of designing a new world.

Contains a broad range of digital images and data that document the rich history of the Museum, its collection, exhibitions, events, people, and activities.

Contains millions of (mostly unpublished) photographs from the LIFE photo archive, going back to the 1750s.

A not-for-profit project dedicated to showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available online. It includes articles from leading scholars, writers, archivists, and artists, as well as curated collections of films, audio, images and texts.Tip: To search for images on this site, add site:publicdomainreview.org to your own keywords in a Google search.

Provides some free stock photos posted by members of the site. Other stock photos are available for a small fee. You can also upload your own images for others to use. A toolbar at the top of the page provides many categories in which you can find images.

Contains hundreds of high resolution public domain images with new images added weekly. Some of these images are over 10MB in size, so if they take a little longer to load, that’s why.

Provides images uploaded by Flickr account holders who have chosen to offer their work under Creative Commons license. There are different types of licenses under the Creative Commons license, and images are sorted by type of license.

Includes hundreds of high resolution images added weekly. Free from copyright restrictions.

A repository of free media files licensed for reuse (often with attribution or other limitations) from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Provides searchable content you can "share, use and remix," including content you can use for commercial purposes or modify, adapt, or build upon for your own purposes.

Holds government photos and images sorted by topic, some are in the public domain or are U.S. Government works others may be copyrighted.

A searchable image database created by various faculty, staff and students of the CSU system. Global in coverage, it contains over 50,000 historical images from a wide variety of fields. These images are licensed under a Creative Commons license and may be used for non-profit, educational purposes as long as credit is given to the copyright holders who retain rights to the images.

Provides photos and videos that can be used for free.

A warm and inviting community where those interested in the software can hang out with fellow WordPressers to engage in enlightening discussions. This post is titled "13 Sources For Free Public Domain and CC0-Licensed Images."

Contains rare and mostly 18th and 19th century digitized items pertaining largely to North and South America.

More than 50,000 U.S. and world maps available online, including historical maps and thematic maps on topics such as climate, energy, ethnography, religion, industry, economy, land use, military, and population.

Searches creative commons license collections containing historical, global and local maps.

Contains images and other materials related to the history of chemistry.

Contains public domain and copyright protected images, easily browsed by category.

Contains image galleries pertaining to topics in astronomy, astrophysics, space, and related earth science subjects, as well as historical images.

A collection of mostly public domain images of Earth taken from space.

A collection of public domain images. Freely search and browse photographs taken during geologic studies from 1868 to the present.

Contains many copyright-free and public domain images. Browse the Agricultural Research Service images and find high-quality photos, easily by category.

A list of image resources for the sciences, hosted by the Library of Congress.