Searching for little known, free image sources proved to be so fun I found you more. More visuals to make your online work pop out. More exciting ways to enhance your blog posts, eblasts, memes, infographics, social media shares, and all your other visual content marketing.
These sources give you free images under a form of Creative Commons licensing. Check each site before you use their images to make sure you’re following correct operating procedure. This way everyone’s happy in image-use land.
Give each title a click to discover what’s new. I don’t promise you loads of cute cat images, but I bet you’ll find a free image source you’ve never heard of before. If you don’t, I owe you a cat photo.
Tookapic
Tookapic offers both free and premium stock photos. You can filter by “free photos” which gives you the CCO licensed photos. They prefer dogs, but the Tookapic blog offers advice on photography, including Tips and Tricks, Photography 101, Tutorials, and Photo Ideas. So you can go right ahead and take photos of cats with all your newly acquired wisdom.
Snapwire Snaps
Get seven free photos every seven days. Photos are public domain and free from copyright restrictions. Download their collection by the week, currently showing week one through sixty, or do a quick search and see what pops up.
Jay Mantri
Beautiful landscapes and close-ups for your free, do-anything use. Check out his archive and see for yourself. Sign up for seven new free images each week and get something perfect for your creative efforts.
IM Free
Their collection features unusual categories such as BW (black and white), ambient, and icons, as well as the more typical fare of nature, business, and health. All the images are free and for commercial use. Some require attribution, so be sure to check before using. You can also build a website if you feel the urge.
Negative Space
Negative Space adds twenty photos each week that you can sort by color, copy space position, and fourteen categories, something not all sites offer that dish out weekly updates. All photos are under the CCO Creative Commons license, so you can use them commercially and no attribution is required. No cats to be found, the one negative about Negative Space.
PicJumbo
Get new free photos delivered to your inbox for commercial and personal use. New photos added daily from a variety of categories, including sunlight, Christmas, and abstract. PicJumbo says attribution is greatly appreciated. 2,108,672 photos since it started in November of 2013, and not a single cat image. Sigh.
Wellcome Images
You can now get ancient manuscripts, etchings by famous artists, and early photography and advertisements in free, high-resolution format from over 100,000 images available through the Wellcome Images collection. Most images are released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license so you can use them free of charge for both personal and commercial use, with acknowledgement to Wellcome Library.
Whether you want to dabble in the morose with images of hysteric and epileptic patients from the Salpêtrière Hospital, or you’re interested in 1887 studies of motion, or a 1384 Persian horoscope, you’re bound to find something unusual and obscure in this historical collection.
Wylio
The word “wylio” is Welsh for “to look at” or “watch.” Thanks to Wylio, you can look at their compilation of photos collected from Flickr, all easily searchable under the Creative Commons Attribution license. They not only curate awesome photos for you, they also give you a free re-sizer, code embedder, and credit builder to use.
Choose your image, select a size slider to set your dimensions, then choose an embed code to automatically upload your photo within a responsive design like WordPress. Wylio generates the embed code, you just add the attribution. All this from “a lean, scrappy, bootstrapping web start-up, located in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee.”
And they have cats, loads of ’em.
Magdeleine
Magdeleine has both CCO public domain and attribution-required licenses, with images easily sortable by both categories. Each curated image displays its license by either hovering the cursor over the image, or with a license stamp in the upper right corner.
You can also sort by eight other categories, the most hits coming from nature, objects, and people. If you’re looking for a color to highlight, you can also search by thirteen color categories.
If you’ve discovered at least one free image source you’ve never heard of with this post or my last post, then I’ve done my job. If not, then you’re spending far too much time online. Or you’re a fellow cat-enthusiast who’s hoping I’ll send you that cat photo I promised.
Image credit: My photo of Longwood Gardens, PA, resident summer house cat, who clearly owns the place.