For my android app I need a lot of images for my design to work. Family works South is a non-profit organisation and stock photos can go between $10 – $20 usd per photo. That would cost Family Works Southland between $1000 – $2000 dollars for just images. I we decided to use public domain / royalty free images . During my search on the internet I found some really great sites for public domain and creative commons images.
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a way for people to protect their intellectual property by declaring what rights the user has to the intellectual property. There are four main elements that can be attached to an intellectual property, these are:
Attribution
Attribution means you must provide appropriate credit to the intellectual property rights holder
Non-Commercial
Others may not use your work for commercial or monetary gain.
No Derivatives
Means Others can share the work but cannot change it
Share-alike
Anyone who adopts or modifies your work must keep the same creative commons as the original work.
Now that I’ve explained the common its time to go over the sites for gather my images.
The Sites
Creative Commons Search
https://search.creativecommons.org/
Creative Commons Search allows you to search google, flickr and pixabay to search for creative common / royalty free images.
It allows you to set what rights you want on the images.
This site allows for the search for images that can be used for commercial use and images that can be modified there isn’t an option for no attribution. This means any images I find on this site I must still check the image licence
Public Domain Pictures
http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/
This site has over 100,000 public domain images. Each image displays its licence so you can reconfirm.
Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images
Most Images on commons.wikimedia care public domain, it pays to check before using though.
Image After
This site is 100% royalty free public domain images.
Public Domain Photos
http://www.public-domain-photos.com/
This site is 100% royalty free public domain images.
Free Images
This site is mostly public domain. There might be some images which aren’t.
Each image has its licence display clearly.
Pixabay
This site has one of the largest selection of royalty free images, but not all might be public domain.
The licence is clearly displayed on each image.
Flickr
This is has a large number of images, all which have their creative commons licence clearly displayed. You are also able to filter searches by creative commons terms.
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