A while ago I reviewed a number of online sources of royalty-free images. While most of these permit you to use images created by others, being certain of what rights you have to reuse and redistribute is not that clear and you nearly always need to contact the originator before you use the image for any public use. This is where Creative Commons makes life easier. By attaching a Creative Commons license, the originator makes it very clear what rights they are allowing for their work. The great thing about CC from the originator’s point of view is that this is very flexible, giving you the option to select which rights to give from all rights to none (explained here)!
And so here a few places where images licensed under Creative Commons can be found.
The Flickr
Easily the best place to find images licensed under CC is the mighty Flickr. If you use Flickr to host your own images you can set your default license to a Creative Commons one as well as giving individual images specific versions. The best place to start to find images licensed under CC is Flickr’s own Creative Commons search page.
Wikimedia
Wikimedia Commons has 2 million files, many licensed under Creative Commons (some are public domain, others under different licenses, but all are supposed to be free).
OpenPhoto
Open Photo is a photo sharing community using Creative Commons licensing.
FreePhotoBank
FreePhotoBank is a free stock photo site where images are licensed under Creative Commons.
Yotophoto
Then there is YotoPhoto, which indexes Creative Commons and other shared images from other sites.
All these sites have images licensed under different licenses too, so do check before you use them. But, if you go for Creative Commons it is much clearer what you can and can’t do with the images you download.
