Jeez, there are sure a ton of ways to find images on the Web, as well as many places where you can find lengthy link lists to image collections.

I’d lay odds that most people, including myself, just use Google Image Search when they need to find an image. However, there might be instances when you want to use another tool — perhaps you’re a language teacher searching for just the right clip art or photography to illustrate a verb, maybe you have very young students and are concerned about what they might find on Google,  possibly you’re particularly teaching about copyright issues, or you want your students to easily connect an image to a writing exercise and have them send an E-Card. (Google has recently added an option in their advanced image search feature — go to the bottom left under “license” and choose “labeled for reuse”)

I thought a “The Best…” list might be helpful in one of those, or other particular, instances.

You can also find the links to sites on this list, as well as links to many other image sites, on my website under Images.

So here are my picks for The Best Online Sources For Images (not in order of preference):

Search by Creative Commons provides excellent explanations about what Creative Commons licenses are, and offers a way to search throughout the web for images that have them.

Flickr Creative Commons is another way to find Flickr images offered for use with a Creative Commons license. Flickr Storm is search tool for the same photos (be sure to click “Advanced Search” to make sure your results include only those with a CC license) — just perhaps in slightly more engaging way.

Smithsonian Images provides access to that incredible collection, and also allows you to use any of them as E-Cards.

Nations Illustrated has 8,000 images from around the world, and also provides an E-Card feature.

The University of Victoria Teaching Clipart Gallery has three thousand images specifically designed for language-teaching.

The Royalty Free Clip Art Collection For Foreign/Second Language Instruction from Purdue University is another place to find images useful for teaching English Language Learners.

The Japanese Language Course Support Site is a smaller, but useful, source of language-learning images.

Pics 4 Learning is specifically designed for teachers and students, and has thousands of images that can be used freely.

Clip Art ETC from Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse offers over 38,000 pieces of clip art for students and teachers.

Edupics is one more source of clip art for use in schools.

Photl.com has 160,000 copyright-free images available.

(Mathew Needleman also suggests Morgue File because “it has quite a few images and it’s not blocked in school”)

I’m also adding a direct link to Darren Draper’s excellent post (including additional resources) called The Educator’s Guide To The Creative Commons.

Here are two more simple ways to search for Creative Commons images:

Behold

Simple CC Flickr Search

PicFindr lets you search many photo sites simultaneously and, in addition to defining the image you want, you can define the restrictions for use. For example, I typed in that I was looking for a picture of a lion for educational use, checked the “none” box for licensing requirements (which means anybody can use it — even without crediting the photographer) and got several hundred images to choose from.

I’m adding Wikimedia Commons to this list.  It has four million images, and their reuse agreement states:

almost all may be freely reused without individual permission according to the terms of the particular license under which it was contributed to the project. Depending on what you want to do with it, you probably do not need to obtain a specific statement of permission from the Licensor.

Seems about as broad as you can make it…

I learned about 25 Places To Find Awesome Stock Photos from Lucy Gray, and decided to add some of the sites on that list to The Best Online Sources For Images.  The “25 Places” post has concise and accurate descriptions of the sites, so I’m just going to quote from them.  I’d also encourage you to check-out their entire list:

Free Foto: “Freefoto is made up of 117,600 images with over 150+ sections organized into 3,285 categories. There’s a search function, and usage is completely unrestricted. All you have to do is include an attribution link back to Freefoto.com.”

Free Digital Photos: “Free Digital Photos has a good search function, which is very important when you’ve got this many images under one resource. Photos are nicely grouped into categories for easy and quick browsing.”

Public Domain Photos: “Public Domain Photos is exactly that: a photographer’s domain for public display, all arranged by corresponding categories. There’s a really good search function available, as well.”

Free Historical Stock Photos: “Free Historical Stock Photos contains various historical images, including many by Matthew Brady (Civil War) and Dorothea Lange (Great Depression). This site also includes paintings and vintage posters. The images are gracefully categorized and easily findable with the use of a search function.”

Big Foto is the newest addition to The Best Online Sources For Images list.  It has a large selection of royalty-free images.

Photos 8 is the newest addition to this list. It has thousands of high quality public domain pictures and is easy to search.

100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images is another incredible list of resources.

Heritage Explorer has hundreds of thousands of British-related images available for free educational use.  You can read more about it at the Kent ICT blog.

World Images, according to its site, is a “database that provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains almost 75,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. WorldImages is accessible anywhere and its images may be freely used for non-profit educational purposes.”

Mashable has just posted a great piece, 26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog.  I’ve already included in this post many of the resources they list.  However, they also listed some sites that are new to me, especially the ones that have freely-available video.  I’m also sure that a ton of additional sources will be accumulating in their comments section.  Because of that, for now, instead of just selectively adding some of their sites to my lists, I’m going to include a link to their post here.

All Our Stock has a bunch royalty-free images, and looks pretty good to me.

The Echo Enduring blog just posted a list of eleven sources of copyright or royalty-free images.I’m adding a few of them to this list:

Stockvault

Dreamstime

Stock.xchng

Free Clip Art by Phillip Martin seems to be a pretty impressive site for clip art that’s free for non-profit use. The art seems a cut above many other clip art sites I’ve seen, and appropriate for many subject areas (that’s how they are categorized).

I’m adding these sites to the list (neither require attribution for their photos though, of course, that would be a nice thing to do):

Unprofound

Burning Well

WP Clip Art has a whole lot of attractive clip art that “…may be used for commercial as well as personal projects without attribution or linking.”

180+ Resources sites to download Royalty Free Stock images

30 Websites To Download Free Stock Photos

The Open Clip Art Library has thousands of examples of clip art that can be downloaded and used for free.

NASA has begun releasing collections of great photos that can be used with no copyright restrictions, and more are on the way. You can read more about it at the Los Angeles Times.

Richard Byrne has posted about a nice site for public domain photos called Image Base. It’s worth reading his post about it.

Kathleen McGeady has written an excellent post on Teaching students about Creative Commons and appropriate use of images.

I’ve just learned about Picapp, a site that has millions of images that can be used on your blog — for free. You can read more about it at Raman Job’s blog

Wylio is a new site for bloggers to find photos for their blogs. In seconds, it finds a Flickr Creative Commons photo, resizes it to exactly what you need, and provides an embed code, which automatically includes an attribution to the photographer..

ookaboo is a new site for free images. Paul Houle, its founder, writes:

Although I started it just last July, Ookaboo already has 510,000 images of 283,000 topics… and it gets better all the time because it adds 8,000 new images each day. Unlike many “free photo” sites, all images in Ookaboo are public domain or creative commons and can be used freely for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. I think it’s perfect for students and teachers to use for schoolwork, handouts, web sites and other creative projects.

Free Images has 6000 original stock photos — all you have to do is credit the site when you use them.

Free Media Goo

Free Stock Photography

Picture Of A is a new site where “all photos are completely free to use and are open source!.

Finding and using public domain photographs comes from Public Domain Sherpa, and contains quite a few sources of good images that are new-to-me. In addition, the site offers helpful advice on using each source.

The Noun Project “collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way.” It’s really quite an impressive collection.

PD Photo has many photos, with the vast majority being in the public domain.

Ken Thomas has lots of nature photos in the public domain.

4 Free Photos is another website that offers a good selection of public domain images.

This news seems pretty neat and, instead of re-inventing the wheel, I’m just going to quote from a Read Write Web post (and I’d encourage you to read their entire piece:

Yale University has one of the larger collections of art, objects and documents of any organization in the U.S. Now, digital images and audio files of the collection are free to access by anyone in the world online, according to an announcement by the university’s communications office.

Yale Digital Commons has debuted with just under 260,000 images. The idea is to encompass the whole of the university’s collections in time.

Here’s the main link to Yale Digital Commons.

The real interesting part of this is that the images are being released with what appear to be absolutely no licensing requirements. Yale says:

“In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use….”

This is a nice post about the Flickr Creative Commons Search tool.

Image After is a great place to find free stock images (you can read more about it at Richard Byrne’s blog).

Public Domain Pictures

ELT Pics is a project initiated on Twitter to collect photos helpful to English Language teachers.

Copyright Free and Public Domain Media Sources provides a nice collection of image resources.

Kozzi has thousands of royalty-free images that can be used for anything — at no charge — without even having to give them attribution. You have sign-up for the site, but registration is free.

PhotoPin is new search engine for Creative Commons images. It has a very nice interface, and I especially like it because you not only get the photos, but it also gives you the exact attribution to copy and paste. Thanks to TechCrunch for the tip, and you can read more about the site at their post.

Feel free to contribute your own favorites, too, by leaving a comment.

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