Free Images and How to Use Them

What is Free Content?

Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works that are free for public use. These are also known as "creative commons", "Copyleft", "Open content" (similar to Open source), "Public domain", "royalty free" or "Share-alike".

Ways to Search for Free Content

Flickr Creative Commons Policy: Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.
Google Advanced Search: Select the + sign next to "Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more" to search for CC content.

Change "Usage rights" to the appropriate rights option.

Choose the Images tab at the top (after doing the search)
Creative Commons Search: A Creative Commons-based search search engine of search engines.
Content Directories - CC Wiki: Content Directories - a list of organizations and projects powered with Creative Commons licenses.
Firefox and CC Search - CC Wiki: A plugin for the Creative Commons search tool is built into the Firefox web browser. The search box defaults to using Google. You can change your search engine by clicking on the small black arrow in the search bar (upper right corner of the Firefox browser).

To Download Firefox, click here
Pic Search: Be sure to look at the sites licensing agreements for wherever you find the images.
PicFindr - Search the free-stock-photosphere (microstock too!) | www.picfindr.com: Loads via Flash.

Free Image Hosting Sites

Add your favorite image hosting sites to the list

These are sites that you can use to upload and link to your images.

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Welcome to Flickr - Photo Sharing

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo m more...34 points

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Photobucket

Photobucket offers image hosting, free photo shari more...28 points

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http://sxc.hu

Royalty free and free photos.15 points

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Shareapic

Upload unlimited pictures. No file size restrictio more...7 points

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Flixya

Upload photos and videos to Flixya. 100% Revenue S more...5 points

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http://imageshack.us/

Free image upload hosting solution.4 points

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Check out my
Photo Edit Yourself
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Free Gifs

Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)

The format uses a palette of up to 256 distinct colors from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations. The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for more simple images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

Gifs.net Free Animations: More the 15,000 absolutely free Animations and animated gifs you can use on Squidoo lens.
Free Gifs - Animations - Clipart: Free gifs, clipart, animations, cars, bicycles, backgrounds, animated animals, Father's Day clipart and more are free.

Free Images (other)

jpeg, png, etc

All Posters - Free to Use and Earn 25 to 30% Commission: Over 400,000+ posters, prints and photos at your disposal!

In addition, you actually earn a commission 25-30% on sales, if you sign up for their affiliate program!

It's a great idea for those on Squidoo!
Art.com - Free to Use and Earn 25-30% Commission: In addition to using their images, you can earn between 25-30% commission on sales of their art and posters.
Free Digital Photos.net: Royalty free photos. Thousands of royalty free photos for instant download. For commercial and non-commercial use. No registration required.

Probably one of the easiest and most immediate to use.
PD Photo - Free Photos: Free Public Domain Photo Database. Thousands of royalty free pictures here.
Free Range Stock.com - Totally Free Stock Photos: Free stock photography for commercial or non-commercial use at freerangestock.com. High-resolution stock images and textures for FREE. Not just royalty free, totally free. Photographers, contribute!.

There's even a plugin for your browser so you can more easily search for photos.

Also, they share 80% of their revenue too!
FreeImages.co.uk - Free Stock Photos: Free images is a high quality resource of digital stock photographic images. Based in UK, so may load slowly for some.
FreeFoto.com - Free Pictures: FreeFoto.com is the largest collections of free photographs for non-commercial use on the Internet.
stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site: Stock photography community - browse our huge gallery for high quality stock photos or share yours with others.
Stockvault.net | Free Stock Photos and Free Images: Stockvault.net is a stock photo sharing website where designers and photographers can meet to share their stock photos and images. All images on Stockvault.net are free for personal and non-commercial usage.
Copyright Free Photos.com: High quality copyright free photo library for any use.
morguefile.com: Morguefile.com free stock photos.

The term "morgue file" is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats.
Image After - Free for Commercial and Personal Use: Free high resolution images. free for commercial and personal use. Daily updates.

Many nature, architectural, industrial, mechanical, and blurred images.

Free Animated Images

Yes, these could be annoying...

Free Animated Images, backgrounds and web graphics. Free to download.: Get free animated images, backgrounds, bullets, buttons, sets, borderes, cool lines.
Animation Factory: Thousands of free 3D animated gifs, clipart and graphics. Flags, buttons, dividers, icons, bullets, animals, and people.
*NaNcY*'s Cat Animation Gallery: Cat animations
Gifs.net Free Animations: More the 15,000 absolutely free Animations and animated gifs you can use on your website, emails, presentations or send as digital postcards. The best source of animated graphics.
Gif Animations: Collection of Free Animations of GIF Images for use in Web Design, Email and Cell Phone

Free Specialty Images

Space, nature, country-specific, etc

DLS: Digital Library System of US Fish and Wild Life Service: Fish and Wildlife Service's online digital media library. You are free to use them as you wish - no permission is necessary. They do ask that you give credit to the photographer or creator and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
NASA Images: This collection of more than 9000 NASA press release photos spans the American manned space program, from the Mercury program to the STS-79 Shuttle mission. This site includes both a full text search and a simple browser.
The Library of Congress: The Library of Congress Digital Collections.

Some images may not be royalty free.
Industrial Art Photography: A huge selection of more than 15,000 energy-related images, including offshore rigs, land rigs, production facilities, refineries and more. You can limit the search to just royalty free images.
From Old Books.com: Over 2,150 high-resolution images scanned from more than 100 different old or rare books, with extracts! Remains of Ruined Castles, Deserted Abbeys, Old Manor Houses, mansions and stately homes; also engravings, woodcuts and pictures of Old England and Wales; symbols, photographs and clip-art, Pictures of old books, and much more.
Welcome to Old Book Illustrations: This site is designed to provide you with a wide range of illustrations scanned from old books.

Most of these pictures are wood engravings or woodcuts, fewer are etchings or copper engravings; Visitors looking for nineteenth century or victorian clipart might just find it here.
The Secret Museum of Mankind: Advertised as "World's Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs" and marketed mainly to overheated adolescents (see the 1942 Keen ad, left), it consists of nothing but photos and captions with no further exposition.
World War II Poster Collection from Northwestern University Library: World War II Poster Collection - The Government and Geographic Information and Data Services Department at Northwestern University Library has a comprehensive collection of over 300 posters issued by U.S. Federal agencies from the onset of war through 1945.
Antarctic Photo Library: Have a look at wildlife, scenery, and the research and research support taking place on the continent. Hundreds of photos are available for you to view and use.
Naval History Center: A collection of photographs and other illustrations of U.S. Navy subjects made prior to 1920, and contain a wide selection of unique photography from later years. It also holds thousands of references to naval photographs held by other repositories.
Free Nature Pictures: Free Nature Pictures, high resolution pics of beaches, forests, deserts, animals, sunsets, mountains, and flowers free to use for any purpose.
Blend Images : Royalty Free Single Images from Matton Images: Blend Images is a stock photography content development company with an exclusive niche focus on ethnically diverse business and lifestyle imagery.
Vintage Pixels - Your Source for FREE vintage and antique photos: Vintage Pixels is a large database of historical, high quality, free-for-use images which allows people to share their archived photos. You can download images for print, or use in graphic design, as well upload images to add to the ever growing album of vintage images. The best part - it's all free.

Free Clipart

Open Clip Art Library: The Open Clip Art Library aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that may be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project must be placed into the Public Domain according to the Public Domain statement created by the Creative Commons.
Flags - Public Domain clip art at WPClipart: Many flags available. This is the flags section of WPClipart, quality Public Domain pictures and art edited to print well for school work.

Images are all in the Public Domain and may be used for commercial as well as personal projects. (A link is appreciated but not necessary.)

*Not free, but you can buy full rights for as low as $1 per image.

Basic: Linking to an Image

How to Use Free Images and Graphics

In Squidoo you can either upload the image into certain modules (Polaroid and Introduction) or you can link to the image using html code.

*In some cases you would want to upload your images to a free image hosting site and then link to it.

Here is a simplified example of the html you would use:

<img src="http://www.yourdomain/squidoo/yourimage.jpg">

Normally you can simply right-click on the image to find the url (address) of the image.

Select Properties

Highlight and then copy the location address. Then paste it into the src part above.

*You will replace the url (http://) with the link to the image

Basic: Making a Clickable Image Link

If you wish to make a "clickable" Image link, you can use the following example, after modifying for your needs.

Simplified HTML code for you to use:

<a href="http://www.squidoo.com/the-lens-you-are-linking-to.html"><img src="THE URL OF YOUR IMAGE"></a>

- You can click on this link.

You can use this for any image, including banners, icons, buttons, or whatever.

The target="_blank" attribute allows you to have a new window open whenever your visitor clicks on your image link (this can be used in normal text links as well).

Just add target="_blank" to your link.

Simplified html code for you to use:

<a href="THE URL OF THE PAGE YOU WANT TO LINK TO" target="_blank"> <img src="THE URL OF YOUR IMAGE" /></a>

Advanced: Resizing Your Images

More advanced anyway than the other section

You can change the sizing of images that are hosted elsewhere by using the size attribute.

It is easy to use. The harder part would be to get the dimensions right, so the image doesn't appear squished.

The html image (img src=) and size (height="pixel size" and width="pixel size") tags looks like the following:

<img src="image.jpg" width="200" height="150">

If you wish to keep the images current size dimensions, you do not need to to include the size tag (width="" height="").

The Golden Gate image above is kept as the current dimension of a 375x500 pixels, as I found it (as seen in properties).

I can resize it to whatever dimension I want by using the size tag.

But what if I just guess at the ratio between height and width? Let's say I make it 200x300 pixels?

Here's the code for the image below:

<img src="http://freedigitalphotos.net/image/s_golden-gate-bridge.jpg" width="200" height="300">

It doesn't look good, does it?

This is why it is important to find a good aspect ratio. But how?

You can use either online or offline (software on your computer) methods to determine the correct "aspect ratio" and resize your image, if you wish.

Here's a list of free ways to resize an image (and determine aspect ratio):

Software:
Irfanview *Recommended
Resize-o-matic

Online:
Shrink Pictures

*Just remember, you may not need to truly resize the image, but just determine the aspect ratio. The size tag will do the rest.

Using the correct aspect ratio, in this case I chose 200x266, it appears to look correctly proportioned.

Here's the code after using Irfanview to determine aspect ratio:

<img src="http://freedigitalphotos.net/image/s_golden-gate-bridge.jpg" width="266" height="200" />

Simple HTML code for you to use:

<img src="URL OF YOUR IMAGE" width="PIXELS" height="PIXELS">

Image Resizing: Software

Add your favorites

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IrfanView

IrfanView ... one of the most popular viewers worl more...12 points

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GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a
more...12 points

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Paint.NET - Free Software for Digital Photo Editing

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software more...4 points

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FastStone Image Viewer - Powerful and Intuitive Photo Viewer, Editor and Batch Converter

Fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, convert more...3 points

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Picasa - Download

The latest Picasa, packed with new features. When more...3 points

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Resize-O-Matic

Image resizing software.1 point

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Image Resizing: Online

Add your favorites

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Resize Images online

Online image resize utility to resize pictures or more...5 points

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Web Resizer - Plus Additional Enhancements

This is a really cool online tool for resizing and more...1 point

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Intermediate: Creating a Row of Images

In order to make a row of separate images you will need to not have any spaces between the image html.

One easy way to make sure there are no spaces is to copy the html into Windows Notepad (without wordwrap). Otherwise, carefully check the code to make sure there are no spaces.

Bad - Notice the space?
<img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/squidoo/yourimage.jpg"> <img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/squidoo/yourimage.jpg">

Good - No spaces between the image html.
<img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/squidoo/yourimage.jpg"><img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/squidoo/yourimage.jpg">

Things to consider:
♩ The total width is approximately 600 dpi, so your images must total less than that pixel width.
♩ You can use padding (see advanced section below) to separate the images.

Advanced: Other Image Attributes

In addition to the other attributes (ie. height and width) that I mentioned, there are others that you can and possibly should use.

The Align attribute:

With the align attribute, you can designate where on the page an image will display.

For example: using the attribute will align the image to the left, right, center, bottom, middle, or top of text on the page.

The html code for the image below:

<img src="http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/lores/S81-30492.jpg" align="left" />

This is just a bunch of example text to see that the image is to the left of the text.

The alt attribute allows text-only browsers to display only the text that is specified in the "alt" attribute for the image.

More importantly though, it is helpful for search engines to identify image content and is important toward Search Engine Optimization.

It is actually important to include the alt attribute on all images that you use, if you want to improve your on-page SEO.

Simplified html code for you to use:

<img src="http://www.example.com/image.jpg" alt="The Title of This Image">

The border attribute defines a border around an image, however it will not work properly in Squidoo lenses. You need to use the style attribute instead.

The style attribute would look something like the following example:

style="border: 3px solid #000000; padding: 8px;"

border: 3px being a border of 3 pixels (change this to change the width of the border)
solid #000000 being a solid black color. Click here for other color choices.
padding: 8px being the distance from the edge of the image

The following html was used in the image below:

<b><img src="http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/photos/colouredpencils.jpg" height="200" width="266" style="border: 3px solid #000000; padding: 8px;" /></b>

Feel free to change it however you like for your situation.

Simplified HTML code for you to use:

<b><img src="http://SOURCE OF YOUR IMAGE.jpg" height="IN PIXELS" width="IN PIXELS" style="border: 3px solid #000000; padding: 8px;"/></b>

Your thoughts, tips, and ideas?

And please add Free Images and Graphics to your Squidoo favorites by clicking here.

If you found it helpful, please rate it.

*Due to spam, HTML is stripped from comments. Sorry.

Reply

TeaLady May 5, 2012 @ 7:29 pm | delete

Thanks for the code. This is very helpful. Also, appreciate all the good links for photos and images.

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Atreyusmommy May 3, 2012 @ 10:45 pm | delete

Thanks for the great info!

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mel-kav Apr 29, 2012 @ 7:20 pm | delete

Thanks for the useful info!!!

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Blonde_Blythe Apr 23, 2012 @ 9:19 pm | delete

Very helpful lens! Thank you so much! :)

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weddingdress123 Apr 5, 2012 @ 2:39 am | delete

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Nasmon77 Mar 17, 2012 @ 5:53 am | delete

Great list! Thanks! My personal favorite resources for free images is pixabay.com. It's really handy, that no attribution is required for those images ...