This page is outdated! A better, more up-to-date page listing resources for finding free images is on Wikimedia Commons, Commons:Free media resources/Photography.
Public domain image resources is a copy of the master Wikipedia page at Meta, which lists a number of sources of public domain images on the Web.
Public Domain images should be marked with the Public Domain Mark 1.0. Public Domain Mark enables works that are no longer restricted by copyright to be marked as such in a standard and simple way, making them easily discoverable and available to others. The Public Domain Mark is recommended for works that are free of known copyright around the world. These will typically be very old works.[1]
For a creator to release their works into the public domain legally they must use the creative commons CC0 license which gives creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law.[2]
The presence of a resource on this list does not guarantee that all or any of the images in it are in the public domain. You are still responsible for checking the copyright status of images before you submit them to Wikipedia.
You can use CCSearch to search for freely licensed images across many of the image sources listed here.
It can also help with finding freely licensed animations, audio and videos.
Public Domain resources should have either the Public Domain Mark 1.0 or the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication mark visible. Non-Public Domain resources should not be added to this list. Listing is ordered alphabetically.
British Library Over a million images, taken mostly from illustrations in 17th, 18th and 19th Century books, released into the public domain, as announced on the British Library blog. Metadata about the images and the books from which they come is also available for download on Github.
Pixnio – A large collection of high resolution public domain images. Free for personal and commercial use, no attribution required.
Devostock.com Over 160,000 free professional images for commercial use.
Flickr Public Domain Search – About 6 million Public Domain images (link is to search filtered by "CC0", "No known copyright restrictions" and "U.S. Gov't Works"). Includes British Library.
Free-Images.com – More than 12 Million Public Domain/CC0 stock images, clip-art, historical photos and more. Excellent Search Results. Commercial use OK. No attribution required. No login required.
Good Free Photos – All public domain pictures of mainly landscape but wildlife and plants as well
LibreShot.com – High-resolution and natural looking photos in Martin Vorel's free stock photo site. Website is divided into several different categories including business, close up, traveling (Mongolia, Thailand, Europe), animals, plants and nature photos. All pictures are licensed under CC0 – Public domain. No need to indicate the source / No registration / For commercial use.
Needpix - library of more than 1.5 million free, or so-called Public Domain Photos and Illustrations licensed with CC0.
PDPics.com Public domain photo collection with about 7400 high resolution pictures up to 6000x4000. All images licensed under CC0 license.
Snappygoat.com – 13,990,108 Free Public Domain/CC0 Images from multiple sources. Single search for images from Wikimedia Commons, Pixabay, Flickr, British Library, NYPL and others. Full image downloads without login or restrictions. Includes a meme maker.
TexturesForFree.com - is a library of high resolution and quality textures and backgrounds from various categories - signs, fabrics, sky, buildings, ground, roads, nature, sea, wood, water, tiles, soil, walls, rocks, doors, debris, concrete, bricks, bokeh, etc.). All licensed Creative Commons CC0.
Wikimedia Commons hosts over 6.2 million public domain or CC0 images. With over 44 million total uploaded files (of all licence types; as of January 2018), it is the largest free "images-only" repository. Commons is the primary repository of media for all Wikimedia projects. Media on Commons can be used readily on all Wikimedia projects, just as if the media were uploaded to the projects directly. Media tagged with the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark can be found here: commons:Category:CC-PD-Mark. CC-Zero marked images can be found here: commons:Category:CC-Zero.
http://www.senate.gov and http://www.house.gov – Congressional sites have a broad variety of public domain images, especially photographs of representatives and senators.
http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Graphics.shtml – A portal to US government images and photos. "Most of these images and graphics are available for use in the public domain"
MedPix Medical Image Database Hosting by Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. The terms of use of the site state that the original submitter may retain copyright. Nearly all of the submitters are US government physicians. The status of the submitter is available to verify that an individual image is in the public domain.
Note: Accurate photographs of two-dimensional visual artworks lack expressive content and are automatically in the public domain once the artwork's copyright has expired (which it has in the US if it was published before 1923). All other copyright notices can safely be ignored.
The Met Collection- The Metropolitan Museum of Art's online gallery includes public domain images of artwork. Choose "open access" search option.
The Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) – American art catalog compiled by the Smithsonian Institution. It has many reproductions of American paintings. However, it is known to have a number of factual errors, so it should be used with great care.
Art Renewal Center – Images of the works of more than 2,600 realist painters, many in the public domain; check catalogue for dates of works and artists.
The Crittenden Automotive Library. Not all are PD! The image detail page will state the status, PD images will be marked "Public domain" or by year of publication if before 1922.
History of Medicine at the National Library of Medicine. Most but not all of the exhibitions are PD. Clicking on "Metadata" near the bottom of the page will generate a popup window with information that includes rights usage for each page.
National Cancer Institute Visuals Online -Great resource for electron microscopy and histological images. Includes general biomedical and science-related images, cancer-specific scientific and patient care-related images, and portraits of directors and staff of the National Cancer Institute.
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases "The majority of information on this site is copyright free and can be freely downloaded and reproduced. Content reproduced without changes should acknowledge the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) as the source."
Clip art, in the graphic arts, refers to pre-made images used to illustrate any medium. Clip art is generally composed exclusively of illustrations (created by hand or by computer software), and does not include stock photography.
http://www.wpclipart.com – exists to maintain and grow an online collection of artwork for schoolkids and others that is free of copyright concerns as well as safe from inappropriate images. To ensure these qualities, no direct user-uploaded images are allowed. This is one of the largest collections of public domain images online (clip art and photos), and the fastest-loading. Maintainer vets all images and promptly answers email inquiries.
Open Clip Art – This project is an archive of public domain clip art. The clip art is stored in the W3C scalable vector graphics (SVG) format.
Public Domain Clip Art- 25,000+ Public Domain Clip Arts (good for printing). Categorized & searchable.
Trove, the National Library of Australia's search engine, includes over 400 thousand freely licensed images, about 300 thousand of which are in the public domain or available under a CC0 license.
ireland-information.com Thousands of Public domain photographs of Ireland, Irish history, scenery, castles, landscapes, etc. as well as photos of items that can be applied to any project: animals, houses, buildings, etc.
The National Library of Ireland on Flickr Uploads hundreds of public domain historic images of Ireland. Much greater ease of use for Wikipedia needs than the actual National Library of Ireland website.
oireachtas.ie uploads "official" portraits of Irish Teachtai Dala and Senators under creative commons licenses. Unfortunately, as of 2021, these images are rarely, if ever, in high resolution.
New York Public Library. Over 700,000 images scanned from books. Including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more. There is a per-image usage fee even for public domain images.
http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/ Images scanned from old books. States that images on the site are the works of artists who "...have been dead for over seventy years, which makes them part of the public domain in many countries". Searchable by keywords.
"The Secret Museum of Mankind" – collection of anthropological photographs published in a 1935 book without copyright. Scanned and released under a CC-NC license, but images should be public domain, at least in the US, since they are faithful reproductions of PD images.
Photos of the Great War many images of World War I, scanned in from public domain resources. Slight usage notice, which is probably compatible with GFDL (requires attribution and link, as does GFDL, requests e-mail notice of usage).
The Heritage of the Great War has several colour pictures from World War I (likely all PD, since the effort taken to scan/reproduce them probably fails to qualify for being a derivative work).
http://archive.org – Scanned-in books, maps, manuscripts, and historical documents; Public Domain; available in a number of formats including epub, kindle, and daisy; Searchable.
http://openlibrary.org – Project of the Internet Archive to provide a web page for every book.
http://books.google.com – Scanned-in books & historical documents. Keyword searchable. Great source for diagrams/illustrations. (not all public domain, many still in copyright) Books google believes are in the public domain are available for download as pdf. see Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.
http://www.theworkofgodschildren.org Collection of high-resolution images of the Roman Catholic saints, religious symbols and related imagery. All pictures have been released into the public domain.
Bing.com – Has an Advanced Image Search that offers images in different resolutions and also categorizes images. Allows free querying of the bing Image Search API up to a certain limit per day.
Everystockphoto.com – Searching over 4.3 million public domain and creative commons photos including Wikipedia and NASA. Free user accounts with drag and drop collections, and other features.
Google Image Search – Advanced search can search for free licensed or PD works. By default, Google does not filter based on license. Add the following (without quotes) to your search URL to display only images with licensing appropriate for Wikipedia: "&tbs=sur:fmc"
