Celebrating World Photo Day with free photos

Today is World Photo Day and we are celebrating it with free photos. There are some places on the web where you can find loads of Creative Commons photos. So, here we are to talk about some of them.

At the top of the list, I have to place Flickr. Flickr has been actively supporting Creative Commons for a long time now, being one of the early adopters. From professionals to amateurs, to institutions and corporations, anyone can use it and the results are amazing. There are bazillions of Creative Commons pictures available and you can even search them using different filters that let you browse the pictures with the right licence for your needs. It is simple and clean, and it’s where I go to whenever I need some free photos to illustrate a blog post or podcasts. If you’re still not convinced, a few good examples of what you can find there are NASA HQ Photo and Playstation Europe galleries. Yes, it’s all under Creative Commons.

Other good places to find CC-licenced pictures include 500px, which is like an alternative to Flickr. They also offer a Creative Commons search engine and a wide catalogue of photographs.

On top of these two, I couldn’t talk about free photos without mentioning the great Wikimedia Commons. Think of it as the Wikipedia of media. Between images, sounds and videos, it has more than 27 millions files available and it keeps counting. Just like the Wikipedia, it is free for everyone to use and contribute.

Archive.org has also some delightful collections of pictures available under Creative Commons and even under the Public Domain. Some of them are curated by renowned institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum; some others give us a deep insight of today’s society, like the Occupy Wall Street collection.

Next time you need some free photos, you know where to look for them.

.: Photo by Jeff Slinker :. CC BY-NC-ND