LibGuides: Open Education Resources (OER): Open Images

Picture icons created by Pixel perfect - Flaticon

Find Open Images

Images

Below is a condensed list of open multimedia platforms. For a full list, visit BCcampus Multimedia and Tool Collections.

Open Verse
An extensive library of free stock photos, images, and audio, available for free use.
Unsplash
Unsplash photos are made to be used freely. All photos can be downloaded and used for free, for commercial and non-commercial purposes, and no permission needed (though attribution is appreciated!).
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Link to Unsplash License
Creative Commons Search
Identifies Creative Commons image and media sites, and allows you to search them one at a time.
Wikimedia Commons
A collection of public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips). For permissions info, see the Reuse guide.
Google Images
Under 'Advanced Search' you can filter by 'Usage Rights' to only show search results published under an open license. For example "free to use share or modify". See - Searching Google Images section below.
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Please note - in November 2022 Google changed their algorithm and searching for openly licensed images broke. As of March 2023 the function has improved somewhat, but there may still be limitations. We recommend using other search platforms and not relying solely on Google Images to find openly licensed images.
cc0.com
Public domain photos.
Picography
Free, high-resolution photos that you can use however you like with Picography's free license.
Pics4Learning
Copyright-friendly image library for teachers and students. For details see P4L's image use policy.
Smithsonian Open Access
Download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images.Access nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

Icons

Noun Project
A collection of icons under public domain or creative commons licenses. User can pay a fee to use the icon without attribution.
Flaticon
A collection of icons that are freely available. User can purchase a license to use icon without attribution.

Searching Google Images

You can use Google to find openly licenses content by selecting 'Settings' and 'Advanced Search'. From there you can change the 'Usage Rights' to filter by license.

Then narrow your results by usage rights.

Open Education Resources (OER): Open Images

Find Open Images.

Find Open Images

Images

Icons

Searching Google Images