How to Use Creative Commons Search

Whenever I talk to students and teachers about creating multimedia projects I always encourage using images that are either owned by them or are in the public domain. Doing that avoids infringing on someone's copyright. It's not always possible to find the right image for a project in your personal images or in the public domain. In those cases it's time to search for images that have a Creative Commons license.

One of the better places to conduct a search for images that have a Creative Commons licenses is on the Creative Commons search page. Through the Creative Commons search you can find pictures from a variety of services. The best part of Creative Commons search is that when you do find a picture you like the attribution information is readily available for you to copy and paste into your credits or citation page.

In the following video I demonstrate how to use Creative Commons search.

13 Alternatives to Google Image Search - Chart

I've seen and you've seen it too many times; a student or colleague needs a picture for a project so goes to Google Images and right-clicks to save the first picture she likes without any consideration of copyright. Even though Google Images does have a usage rights filter there are still better places to find images that are either in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license.

In the chart that is embedded below I feature thirteen alternatives to using Google Image search. All of sites in the chart offer images that are either in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license.

If you cannot see the embedded chart, click here to view it as a Google Document.


Join my upcoming course, Video Projects for Every Classroom to learn more about using public domain and Creative Commons images in video projects. 

Solate.tk - Another Good Source of Creative Commons-licensed Pictures

It is not a secret that Pixabay is my favorite place to find pictures for slideshows and blog posts. As good as Pixabay is, sometimes I need to branch in my quest for quality images. Solate.tk is a new-to-me place to find Creative Commons-licensed images. According to Solate.tk's homepage, all of the images are hand-chosen from Flickr's library of Creative Commons-licensed images. The images are arranged into five categories; nature, landscape, food, urban, and a generic "stuff" category. You can also use the search box to locate images.

Applications for Education
The manual curation of images makes Solate.tk a good alternative to having students search on Flickr. Remember that the images on Solate.tk have Creative Commons licenses so you will need to remind students to give proper attribution to the owners of the images that they download.

Thanks to Aaron Robb for sending me an email about Solate.tk.