Safe Image Searching
The sites below are copyright-friendly and learning focused, and provide excellent resources for students using pictures in their lessons and projects.
- MorgueFile.com - free for non-commercial use
- Pics4Learning
- Galileo
Choose Teen, and search By Type, choose Pictures, Maps and Flags
- Discovery Education
Obtain a login from your teacher
- American Memory
American Memory is the online collection of the Library of Congress, with thousands of historical photographs, maps, and documents that can be browsed by collection or searched. Teachers and students may use most of the images, but be sure to abide by any copyright notices included in the collections.
- New York Public Library Digital Gallery
The New York Public Library Digital Gallery provides free and open online access to hundreds of thousands of images. Categories include arts and literature, cities and buildings, history and geography, industry and technology, nature and science. Images may be freely downloaded for personal, research, and study purposes only.
- Creative Commons
Creative Commons' "tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to keep their copyright while allowing certain uses of their work — a “some rights reserved” approach to copyright — which makes their creative, educational, and scientific content instantly more compatible with the full potential of the internet. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law. We’ve worked with copyright experts around the world to make sure our licenses are legally solid, globally applicable, and responsive to our users’ needs."
- Additional Resources for works in the Public Domain