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Finding Images for Research

Finding images for your research can be tricky. This guide has links to resources that will help you navigate sites that have images you can use.

Image Search Engines

  • Flickr:  Flickr does not search the web for images but is an online photo management site with individual and institutional participants.  Be sure to change the license settings from Any License to Creative Commons Only.  Hosting various institutions “no known copyright restrictions”, The Commons on Flickr is also useful for historical images. 
  • Google Image Search:  Advanced search feature allows you to narrow results by usage rights.  Choose the appropriate setting (most common academically is the “free to share or use” option.  If you are going to make changes or adapt the photo choose “ free to share or modify” instead.   You can allow filter the search by size, color, or type such as photo, clip art, or animated drawing. 
  • OpenVerse: Openverse searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.
  • Wikimedia Commons:  Part of the Wikipedia family, Wikimedia contains images, video and audio files that are explicitly free to use with public domain and freely-licensed educational media content.  Click on the image to view copyright parameters.

FACULTY CANVAS TIP:  An easy way to embed Creative Commons images from Flickr, with attribution, use ImageCodr.  You provide the Flickr URL and it will generate the correct HTML code, link back to the image, and give attribution.  

 

 

Guide credits

Grateful acknowledgement is given to California State University Northridge for allowing us to reuse the content on their Finding and Using Images Guide.