Vintage Public Domain Images for FREE

hi it's Susan welcome back to my channel I have something just a little bit different for you today today I want to answer the question I get asked quite frequently and that is where do I find all the great images that I am using in my handmade journals and my various art projects people usually ask me are you using a digi kit and have to say nope I have never used a digit in my life or at least not yet I have nothing against digi kits there are some beautiful ones out there it just doesn't happen to be the way I work and besides I have a humongous collection of historical photos and vintage illustrations that I have collected over the years because I might have just a little tiny wee bit addiction to looking for this sort of thing it would be really scary to tell you the number of graphic images that I have on my computer right now but that's okay never mind about that I am going to take you on a journey to visit all my favorite websites where I find images that are in public domain free from copyright restrictions and legally ok for you to use in your projects even projects that you are going to turn around and sell I can also tell you one place I am NOT going to take you I am NOT going to take you to Pinterest I need to say this right here right now because it's sort of bugs me Pinterest is not another word for public domain there are some beautiful images on Pinterest and it is a great place to go for inspiration and to be inspired by other people's creativity or just to kind of you know take steps back in history there's a lot of fun things on Pinterest but so many times I hear people say oh yeah I just found that image on Pinterest and I downloaded it and then suddenly they've printed it out they put it in a project and they're putting that out there for sale and possibly that was someone's personal artwork that is not available for public domain so you as the creator as the artist that is looking for these images it is your responsibility to do your due diligence and make sure that the images that you are using are legally ok for you to do and that means especially on Pinterest please do a reverse image search if you're not sure to see if the graphic or the photograph or whatever it is that you want to use is in the public domain if you don't know how to do a reverse image search using either Google or tin I let me know when I can do a short video for you on that all right so we are not going to go to Pinterest but we are going to go to a lot of other fun places and I'm only going to do one place probably per video because otherwise they're gonna get too long and everybody's gonna fall asleep the first place I like to go believe it or not is not Google do you go to Google first you can let me know down in the comments where do you first go when you're looking for images probably the first place I go to most often when I'm looking for a graphic is I go to Flickr if you have not seen Flickr before started off as primarily for photographs years ago photographers would upload their photos to Flickr so that they could share them with the world now that we have so many people digitizing collections we have a lot of libraries and historical places that are digitizing photographs that have been hidden in backrooms and then putting them up here on Flickr and most of them are in the public domain or free of copyright restrictions so that you can use them and so it's just it's a great way for these types of historical documents to get a wider distribution to the world so Flickr is free for you to join but you do need to join and make an account and then once you're on there it's like Facebook and Instagram you can find your favorite people or favorite institutions to follow and when you do when you first log into Flickr that's what you're going to see is the people that you follow right now what you're looking at is some of my dog photography that is on Flickr so like any search engine because that's kind of what Flickr is now is it's just this giant search engine of graphics you know there are illustrations there are old documents there are photographs but it's a search engine with a search bar so like any search engine you can get to the same place three or four different ways and I'm just going to show you a few of the things that I tend to do when I'm here so the commons is a place where organizations and people that are uploading to their they can give them a Creative Commons a Creative Commons license which then lets the public know that they're going to be able to use those in a newsletter in a blog post and depending on which type of license they're given they can modify it or not modify it they can sell it or not sell it they can give credit or no credit and so you it's your responsibility as the artist creating things with these images it's your responsibility to do your due diligence and make sure that the images that you are downloading are appropriate for the use that you have in mind for them if you come over here to the Commons let's just look at this list and you can see there are a lot from all over the world just a lot of libraries a lot of historical society a lot of military places are just tons and tons of places that are uploading their photos and if you want to go to just a particular one say you want to look at the northern public record office of Northern Ireland you can click on their icon here and suddenly you get this little drop-down arrow if you click on that it will take you to the photo stream for just that particular institution alright but if you're looking for something in particular and you want to start by searching the Commons let's go back a page here and you can come down here and it says search the Commons so let's look for I used to be a writer let's look for typewriter and I want to look for an illustration all right let's just give you some ideas on what you can search for and how to search for them and where to look for the Licensing's so here I've got some illustrations about old typewriters look at this that is very different early typewriters this is from the Internet Archive book which is an awesome archive to go check out on its own taken from about 1893 and if you see down here that's a page up a little bit more you can see no known copyright restrictions it's from 1893 you can go ahead and use this in a project and wouldn't that be a lot of fun alright so now let's go look for something else now when you're at the top of this page here you are still in the Commons if you want to make sure that you're always searching the Commons make sure you come down here where it said search the Commons otherwise if you put your search thing up here let me show you what's gonna happen let's look for well let's look for the same thing let's look for typewriter illustration up here and this is going to take you to all of Flickr whoops it didn't spell it right typewriter illustration this is going to take you to all of Flickr and what that means is it's not necessarily going to be in the Commons they are not necessarily going to be images that you can use if I click on this and I have these old typewriter pictures here it says all rights reserved I can't use that so if you want to be searching for things within the Commons make sure you go back to the Commons page and you can always just come up here click the Commons and you page down just a little bit and you get search the Commons now let's look for something different let's look for a vintage Valentine just want to give you a few ideas of what you might find on here and look at this oh I love this somebody just got married wouldn't that be a great Valentine's Day card this is from National Library of Norway taken on July 9th 2014 but it's when they say take in there that means that they scanned it or they digitized it at that time no known copyright restrictions so that's something else that you could search for and again making sure that you are within the cult Commons if I come up here and I search for it again I am not gonna find the same images I'm gonna get different things so make sure you're within the Commons if you haven't done that you can come down here vintage Valentine and click on this license arrow and you can choose Commons there if I want to look for something on Flickr I can come over here and type in exactly what I'm looking for maybe I'm looking for a vintage dog illustration but I have to make sure that I check the license arrow here and pick one of these you can search the Commons from here and you have some other options I usually go to commercial and mods aloud and choose that one then you can page down and see if there's anything that catches your eye I like this one let's take a look at this this is Wow I like this and this says that this is in public domain so you can spend a lot of time searching for just a particular image if that's what you're trying to find on Flickr but if you are interested in say botanical type of things let me show you a few of my favorite people to go visit so this is one of my favorite places to go visit on Flickr Swallowtail garden seeds and they've got over 5,000 photos and illustrations that they have uploaded for us and this just gives you an idea of the beautiful albums that they have with varying amount of graphics in each of them and there are a lot to choose from I just picked one to show you this is also from Swallowtail garden seeds but just to give you an idea of some of the beautiful botanicals that you could possibly download from them and when you want to download from them you come over here to this little arrow you click it on and you can download in various sizes I tend to always download the largest file possible just so I have more options to manipulate the photo if I should want to but they do add up as far as size go so make sure you have room on your computer another place I like to visit is this one and this is elusive Muse and I don't know if this is a person or an organization one of the things they tend to do is gather a lot of public domain images from other organizations that you could probably go to their websites but I like seeing them here on Flickr because they have put them into albums and since there's such a wide variety it's a lot easier if I'm looking at the albums and I can decide from the albums if there's something that I want to go see rather than a lot of times if you go to like the Internet Archive and you're looking at public domain images there they're just sort of all over the place and you have to scroll and scroll and scroll and spend a long time browsing so here's one of my favorite albums from the elusive muse this would be fish look at some of these beautiful plates those are just gorgeous and you would just come over here to a little arrow download them big files another place I like to go to is the biodiversity heritage library 134 thousand photos in there albums here and look at these aren't they absolutely beautiful they have been scanning lots and lots and lots of old books and putting the images up here so people can use them go over to their albums so many beautiful albums butterflies look at these beautiful images so again you will need to check on all the photos that you want to download check what the rights are some rights reserved usually what this means what this little icon is that you can use it you can manipulate it you can sell it but you need to give credit where you got the graphics from so you're gonna have to do some kind of attribution to the original person of that photograph now one of the other things if you want to see if you can actually find things that just say public domain so you don't have to worry about giving credit anywhere come up here in your search bar and you can type public domain butterfly illustration and we're going to get something like this and this looks really beautiful so we have this wonderful graphic that somebody has probably scanned from an old book cleaned up and scanned it for us to be able to use and then over here where the license says public domain okay you know you're good there so let's page down here a bit further and see if they have tagged this photo and they have tagged this public domain so you can go ahead and click on the public domain tag and what you're going to get are images that are tagged public domain you might have their groups that you can join about public domain these are photographs that have been tagged public domain and this is this is a rabbit hole unless you're putting in very specific items that you're looking for but look at this old photograph this is in public domain so this is an album here that somebody's put together that says public domain if you click on that it's another rabbit hole be warned but all images in this set are considered to be in the public domain set this license as I don't believe I or anyone else has copyright claim to the images and therefore I encourage to reuse and wider appreciation so look in here look at these wonderful images these are like glass negatives I think and some some of the cabinet cards the children so that's what I have for you today I have a visit to Flickr and a few of my favorite places and a few tips on how to search around on Flickr if you are looking for a particular type of image to use on a project and you just can't find it leave me a note down in the comments and I will put my thinking cap on and maybe I can track something down for you or somebody else might have some suggestions if you like this idea of visiting more sites where you can find more images to use that are in the public domain and are free from copyright restrictions let me know about that as well so that's what I have for you today a visit to Flickr where you can fall down the rabbit hole and join me in searching for old images and old illustrations that we can use in our art that we're making today I will take you on another journey to another website real soon thanks so much for watching bye for now

Channel: Susan Taylor Brown

Views: 25,375

Keywords: public domain copyright free images, copyright free images, royalty free images, free images, free vintage images, public domain images, how to find free vintage images, how to find public domain photos, Public domain copywrite free images, Free Public Domain images, public domain images free, copyright free, find free images, find public domain images, public domain photos, free photos, copyright free photos, public domain art, free images for artists, CC0, Find free photos

Id: BpslrqNf8lI

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2019