Library Guides: Find Sound, Images, &amp; Video: Find Images & Videos

Image & Video Resources

Streaming Media Resources Available at MSU-Bozeman
Identify and access streaming media resources for your course or personal use.

Agricultural Research Service Image Gallery
Copyright-free, public domain high-quality digital photos available free of charge from the USDA.
Art Institute of Chicago
Free, unrestricted use of over 50,000 images of works in the collection believed to be in the public domain. You are welcome to use any images with the label “CC0 Public Domain Designation” for any purpose, including commercial and noncommercial uses, free of charge and without additional permission from the museum.
BioArt Source
Build figures, presentations, and illustrations with 2,000+ science and medical art visuals.
Creative Commons Search Portal
The Creative Commons (CC) Search Portal helps you search CC licensed works across multiple platforms. Check the image information for usage restrictions.
EDUimages
A free library of photos celebrating students—and the educators who teach them—in seven schools across the United States.
Getty Center
Over 150,000 images of public-domain art and archives in the Getty collections have been made freely available, without restrictions.
Google Images
After you do your images search, click on "Tools" under the search bar. Then select "Usage Rights" and "Creative Commons licenses."
Granger Educational Picture Archive
Granger's vast historical collection is available free of charge to teachers, librarians and students. Find images for virtually every subject under the sun, from before the Stone Age to the dawn of the Space Age.
The Greats
Socially engaged visual content open to anyone to use or adapt non-commercially.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Open access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. Organized into over 100 thematic collections, the digital collections comprise more than 9 million items. Verify rights and restrictions.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Nearly 20,000 high-quality images of art are available to download and use as you see fit.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Met makes all images of public-domain artwork available for unrestricted use under Creative Commons Zero. Anyone can download, share and remix these images.
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Mia’s collection contains over 50,000 works in the Public Domain! You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the works, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
The Museums of the City of Paris
The fourteen museums of the City of Paris bring together collections that are exceptional in their diversity and quality. This effort is accompanied by the gradual, free and unrestricted availability of digital reproductions of works in the public domain, in high definition.
Nappy
Free high resolution photos of black and brown people; License: Creative Commons Zero (CC0)
National Gallery of Art
Open access image downloads for more than 60,000 objects. Images of these works are available free of charge for any use, whether commercial or non-commercial.
New York Public Library
Over 290,000 items in the digital collection are in the public domain to reuse in limitless ways, no permission required.
The Noun Project
A diverse and extensive collection of free icons and photos. Registration (free) required.
Openverse
An extensive library of free stock photos, images and audio, available for free use.
Pexels
All photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means the pictures are completely free to be used for any legal purpose.
picryl
Search public domain, copyright-free media from hundreds of sources.
Pixabay
Over 4.1+ stock images, videos, music, vectors, GIFs and sound effects. Registration (free) required.
Public Domain Image Archive
Out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse.
Smithsonian Open Access
Download, share, and reuse more than 4.5 million of the Smithsonian’s digital items, without asking. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
Wikimedia Commons
Searches freely usable images, sound, and video.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)

Generally, the following information, when available, should be included in your citation:

Photographer, artist, or creator's name
Title of the work
Date created
Repository, museum, or owner
City or Country of origin
Access date and web site address (URL)

Best Practices for Attribution of Creative Commons Licenses
One condition of all creative commons licenses is attribution: crediting the author and giving the source information.
How to Cite an Image in APA, MLA, or Chicago
How to Cite a YouTube Video in APA, MLA or Chicago

Public Domain: Creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds the exclusive rights, anyone can legally use or reference those works without permission. Determining what is or isn't in the public domain can be a complicated process. However, this chart can help guide you through some of the rules of US copyright.

Copyright: A copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression. Only the copyright owner has the right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. Copyright covers many different types of work, including paintings, photographs, illustrations, musical compositions, sound recordings, computer programs, books, poems, blog posts, movies, architectural works, and plays.

Creative Commons Licenses: Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, What can I do with this work?

creative commons license type

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Image & Video Resources