Research Guides: Basic Video Production: Finding Images and Sounds

Open Access Images

Finding images online that you can freely use in your projects, presentations and assignments can be challenging. This guide outlines how to find images, different types of licensing and how to properly attribute any image that you use.

Why use an Open Access Image?

All Open Access images can be used for non-commercial educational purposes.
Some Open Access images can be used even for commercial purposes.
Many Open Access images are published in a digital format so you can easily find them on-line.
You don't have to worry about copyright when using open images, as long as you follow the rules use and for attribution, if the works are licenced under Creative Commons licences.
Open Access images can be used in public facing student projects like posters, conferences, blogs, your portfolio as long as you follow the rules of the licences.
You can even remix and build upon some Open Access images depending on the license terms. So they are a great choice for inclusion in creative projects.
Images in the public domain also are often considered open and many can be found on the web.

Audio Resources

dig.ccMixter
Creative Commons-licensed music samples
Bensound
Freeplay Music
Publicdomain4u
Freesound
"Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse. Freesound provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to: browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a "sounds-like" type of browsing and more; upload and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license; interact with fellow sound-artists!
We also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used for scientific research and be integrated in third party applications."
Sound of Picture
Creative Commons-licensed sounds for projects
Free Music Archive
"The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America...Every MP3 you discover on The Free Music Archive is pre-cleared for certain types of uses that would otherwise be prohibited by copyright laws that were not designed for the digital era. These uses vary and are determined by the rights-holders themselves (please see our FAQ)..."
Legal Music for Videos (Creative Commons)
Creative Commons Search
BBC Sound Effects
Ten sites for royalty-free music

Find Open Access and Public Domain Images

Best Bets for Finding Images

Creative Commons Search (now Openverse)
Creative Commons Search is a tool that can help you search other databases (Europeana, Flickr, Jamendo, etc.) for images, music, video, and other media protected under a Creative Commons Licence.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons contains over 27 million freely usable media files, including images, sounds, and videos. The highest quality items are ‘Featured’ by the site and appear in picture of the day and picture of the year selections.

Other Image Sources

Digital Public Library of America
Over one million images from US public libraries, many images are in the public domain, but check as licences can vary.
Europeana
Europeana is an archive of millions of digitized items from European cultural heritage institutions. Multiple formats (image, video, text, sound) are available. Please read licences of images as they vary.
Flickr Commons
Flickr Commons is a repository for historical images from cultural heritage institutions such as libraries, museums, and archives. Most material has “no known copyright restrictions” and is free for noncommercial use. Please check licences.
Flickr Creative Commons
Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license. You can browse or search through content under each type of license.
I-Open
Open Access Biomedical Image Search Engine
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All images require attribution, and are licenced under various levels of Creative Commons licensing unless licensing is not listed on an image which means you should contact the journal. Collection is from The Open Access Subset of PubMed Central (PMC), a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the Indiana University hospital network, the Orthopaedic Surgical Anatomy Teaching, and the Collection at the USC Digital Library.
New York Public Library
This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.
Smithsonian Open Access
Smithsonian Open Access lets you download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from the Smithsonian collections This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
Wellcome Collections (UK)
Find thousands of Creative Commons licensed images from historical library materials and museum objects to contemporary digital photographs. Science Images.