The Commons public photo collection

The Commons on Flickr is a collection of public photographs (with no known copyright restrictions) from a host of public archives including:

• The Library of Congress
• DC Public Library Commons
• New York Public Library
• London School of Economics (LSE) Library
• Bibliothèque de Toulouse
• and others

LSE Library's photostream

Bibliothèque de Toulouse's photostream

Photo of Abraham Lincoln from The Library of Congress' photostream

Google Advanced Image Search – copyright free image search

I’ve previously written about obtaining images you can freely use. I just wanted to make a quick update (though I’ve got more to write about this topic in future) about the use of Google Image Search to locate images that you can freely use. So I put together a 2min 30sec screencast to quickly explain what to do.

Stock photos

So you need some photos and you haven’t taken any suitable pictures yourself. Well there are some sites where you can download stock photos for free or very cheap per item.

• Freerange – you just been to register for the service and then you have access to thousands of high-resolution photos.
• Freedigitalphotos – has a catalogue of photos nicely categorised. You can download small images for free, and pay for larger ones.

And them there are the user upload sites. The most well known is Flickr. You need to check the licence agreement the photographer has applied to the photos; if a suitable Creative Commons licence has been granted then you can use the photo, as long as you attribute appropriately.