There are lots of places online you can use to get free images. One of our favorites is pexels.com, which has a nice collection of user submitted images that can be downloaded. We’d also throw in our own little growing library of royalty-free images in our Workshop (get a free account!).
Another place where you can find great pictures is at Google Images itself. Quite frankly it is where most people go. Now we’ve told people for years to be careful what they download from Google – sometimes you open yourself up to copyright violations and scary DMCA notices if you just grab anything on there. It’s just not cool to steal someone else’s images for your own use without proper permissions (even though Google makes it easy to do so).
However, Google has added helpful filters to their menus. So you can now actually sort image search results and have it only display files that have been tagged with appropriate usage rights.
You’ll want to simply go to the Usage rights sub-menu and check off “Labeled for reuse”. If you want to be able to freely modify it, check off “Labeled for reuse with modification”. There are also non-commercial options as well, which will display more images if you don’t plan on using them in a for-profit environment.
By using these filters, you should be able to find some great images for your web sites and publications without worrying about copyrights. As always, be sure to double check the source of the image when you go to download it – just to make sure it is a true public domain image and wasn’t simply mislabeled.
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