
The creators of many of the images on these websites are giving up some of their copyright protection and allowing you to use their photos and artwork. However, they may have usage rules that they require you to follow: for example, they might ask you to attribute the creator of the image if you use it. (Attribution = including information, on your website or wherever you use the image, saying who made the image and where you found it.) Before you copy or use any image, it’s a good idea to look at the webpage for the image and check for usage or licensing rules. I’ve included links to the general usage rules for many of the websites in this list. Quick disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and cannot provide advice regarding your legal rights. However, I can help find material that might assist you in your research, or help you learn how to contact a lawyer. Questions? Please ask!
ImageQuest - https://multcolib.org/resource/imagequest: ImageQuest is a library resource created by the Encyclopædia Britannica with millions of images that you can use for non-commercial purposes. There is a photo for just about any subject you can think of. The collection includes photos and clip art, and even allows you to sort results by shape (horizontal or vertical rectangle, or square). Information is provided for each image about the creator and rights.


U.S. Government Images search - https://search.usa.gov/search/images?affiliate=usagov&query=: The USA.gov search engine lets you look for photos and images from the federal government. You can find photos of just about anything, from satellites to Socks the cat, with little or no usage restrictions. Most of the results take you to images located on the Flickr website: before you use the image for your own project, make sure to look for usage information on the image's Flickr page.

Encyclopedia of Life - http://www.eol.org: this website’s mission is to “increase awareness and understanding of living nature,” and it includes information and images on all kinds of living creatures, from moths to amoebas to mollusks to monkeys. It includes many images, most of which are free to use as long as you attribute the source.

Pixabay - https://pixabay.com/en/ offers over 1/5 million royalty free stock photos and videos.
Unsplash - https://unsplash.com/ Over 550,000 free high resolution photos shared by a huge online community of photographers.

Are websites not your thing? Do you prefer books? Well, the library still has plenty of those. We have many books of illustrations and prints on all sorts of topics, most of them royalty-free. To find them, just do a subject search in the library catalog for “clip art.” You’ll find books with images of Victorian women’s fashion, birds, children’s book illustrations, fairies, and much more, many of them including CD-ROMs with computer files of all the images in the book. At the end of this blog post is a book list showing examples of the types of clip art books that the library owns.
If you still have trouble finding the images that you want, or if you have more questions about any of this, you know what to do: Ask a Librarian! We’ll be happy to talk more about it.
Images included in this post:
- Photo of a camera, by Rodrigo Senna from Brasília, DF, Brasil (Flickr) [CC-BY-2.0], http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photography.jpg
- Creative Commons logo, http://creativecommons.org/
- 19th century painting of an American schooner, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/collection-search-result.html?accession=1991.144.1&pageNumber=1
- Children reading a wireless newspaper, http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationaalarchief/4193509648/
- Photo of a flower, http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/196907
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