How to Get Free Open Source Photos for Your Website and Presentations



Visuals aids such as photos, are very important because they help you pass information and feelings, attract attention, maintain concentration, and help explain abstract concepts. Most professional presenters use photos and other images in their presentation. I personally find that the audience is better tuned when I present images than words.
The problem is that most images cost money – most photographers want you to pay royalties for the images you use.
Lucky enough, there are many images released under an open source license called creative commons

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001.

Many of the licenses, notably all the original licenses, grant certain “baseline rights”, such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work without changes, at no charge. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_licenses)

Where to get photos and images released under Creative Commons?

This is where I find my photos and imagery for my presentation and sites:

  1. Go to flickr advance search page (http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/)
  2. Tic the “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” option
  3. Optionally, Tic “Find content to use commercially”
  4. Optionally, tic “Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon”
  5. Enter the search term for the photos (e.g “computers”)
  6. Choose your image, use it

Important to note

Don’t forget to link back to the photo and comply with the license terms


CC image link

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Amir Shevat

Amir Shevat is the global Startup Outreach lead in Google Developer Relations (g.co/launch). Previously, Amir Led Google Campus Tel Aviv and was the co founder of several startups.

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7 Responses

  1. Thanks for the very useful information!!! excellent article, simple and to the point.

  2. anony says:

    thanks for the info. I have spent so much time looking for open source pictures.

  3. Prodyot says:

    Thanks for the information.
    Very helpful.

  4. We too, have been searching for some open source pictures to help add some visuals to our blog.

    We’re all in a favor of CC! Cheers for this.

  5. amgad says:

    thank you so much
    wonderful article

  6. Lucie says:

    Hi, i would like to add one more Source for Free Photos to your list. I search photos for my Blog in the following Website. All images on this website are licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain license CC0. I recomend http://creativecommons.photos

  7. anonymous says:

    Dear Amir, as a person who knows just a tiny bit of HTML, just enough to tweak Word Press, I found this article just perfect for my level. Thank you for making the information available and simple. I am going to check around your blog for other easy stuff I can do. Gina

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