It has been said correctly that “a picture is worth thousand words”. Millions of websites and blogs present in Internet arena use it more often to reflect their thoughts and opinions through some great pictures as images help the readers for better understanding of the text content. But since the Internet is full of millions and billions of pictures it really becomes tough to find out whether the picture is free from copyrights or not. Sometimes webmasters and people in their online work use these images which may be actually the property of some other person or websites, which results in copyright infringement ultimately.
The most common way among webs masters to search for an image is to search on popular search engines like Google, yahoo, AOL etc but these sites also can't guarantee you of copyrights free images, you might have observed in Google image search that it reflects a message in sidebars which says " This image may be subject to copyright. ". So is there any way out to find free, copy right free and royalty free images on the web?? Certainly there is!!
Fortunately there are many great websites that stock copyright free and royalty free images & digital photographs which can be used anywhere without giving any credit to any person or website. These sites contain “Public Domain Photos”, which can be used for both personal and commercial purposes, and the images are completely free from copyrights and royalty.
Public Domain photos: Offers a vast collection of clip art images and high resolution photos.
PDPhoto.org: Is a repository for free public domain photos.Most of these photos are free to use for any purpose.
Historical Stock Photos: Free Historical Stock Photos for Emails and Personal Websites.
Pixabay.com: Is a repository for free public domain images. You can upload your own photos and share your work with others. You can use any image from this website freely for personal and commercial use without attributing the original author.
4FreePhotos: Is another site that offers quite a few artistic high quality images. Many of these would be great for backgrounds.
Florida’s Educational Technology Clipart Clearinghouse: Is a true clip-art and line drawing gold mine. It contains over 46,000 images in its database.
Karen Whimsey Public Domain Images: Is a phenomenal public domain gem of clip-art, diagrams, sketches, and more for the classroom.
NOAA Public Image Library: Is a wonderful resource for science themed drawings, maps, graphics, diagrams, and photos. The database is extensive.
Photos8: Is one of my favourite public domain image sites. The images are high quality, high resolution, and offer an artistic approach. I use many of these for backgrounds in Glogsters and PowerPoints.
Pics4Learning: Is a great website full of photographs donated by amateur photographers and teachers to help all of us improve our curriculum.
Wikipedia:Public domain image resources: Contains a huge collection of websites with public domain images, in a great organized and categorized manner.
Free Stock Photos: Offers royalty free images with no usage restrictions
Free Stock Photos: Offers royalty free images with no usage restrictions