Where to Find Free Public Domain Images

hi I'm Susan Taylor Brown this is another episode in my series of finding free images online and by free I mean copyright free in the public domain okay for you to use printout modify put in your art projects and then turn around and sell that art project that you just created so where we gonna go today how about we visit the Library of Congress you would not believe the number of archives that they have available online they have been busy digitizing things for years and you could just spend hours and hours there taking trips back in time and looking at all these historical photographs and historical documents and some of them are completely free of copyright restrictions that you can go ahead and use in your work now I want to make one disclaimer here about copyright I happen to be in the United States so I am familiar with my copyright laws I am not familiar with copyright laws throughout the rest of the world so it is your responsibility as the artist as the writer as the person who was downloading these images it is your responsibility to do your due diligence and know the laws within your country as to whether or not you can use any of these images each of the sites I take you to you can go to their credits page you can search for the word copyright and it will tell you more about the copyright restrictions within that collection and how they might or might not apply to you so there are two ways that you can go exploring at the Library of Congress you can go to their main page here and you can just start searching and you can click down this little drop down here you can look for printed material and that's going to take you to a lot of items that are in the public domain but it's also going to take you to a lot of things that where you're either going to have to make sure to give credit or it's not available or you have to pay some money for it now there's nothing wrong with any of that but maybe you just want to go look for the free stuff okay so the Library of Congress has come up with this other really cool thing they have curated a lot of their archives into categories of items that are completely in the public domain and okay for you to use now you may or may not find something that works you hear but they do have a really nice selection here so this is what you would go to is this website here and I will put a link down in the description box below but it is the free to use and reuse sets and they are encouraging people to come explore these various collections and see if there's something in here you can use so let's just check out one of these collections one of the things you will notice when you visit a lot of the government archives is if the pages might be slow to load you're just gonna have to take a deep breath have a cup of coffee and wait because there is so much activity happening on these websites that it just sometimes can take a while so let's see if there's anybody in here that looks interesting to us this is something I would always click on because it's people reading and I'm just always attracted to any photographs of people reading so look at this isn't that beautiful it's a nice size photo and so if you want to download it you can come right over here now they do have other options you can get a humongous TIFF file 146 Meg so be careful when you're looking over here to download and make sure you get something that you can handle I would think a 5 kilobyte JPEGs not going to be enough I would probably come up here and get the 73 Meg file just because I want something that's going to print nicely if you page down here it's going to tell you all about when it was created between 1894 1901 it's a glass negative and what does it tell you down here about the rights rights and access you can click on this and it tells you this now I'm going to say this again and again and they're saying that as well rights assessment is your responsibility you can't say oh I found it online oh I found it on Pinterest if you saw my last video you heard my rant about Pinterest Pinterest is not another word for public domain so it is up to you to take the responsibility to check out the rights sometimes it means you're free to use it sometimes it means you have to give credit and it's up to you to figure out how you're going to do that if you're doing it in a journal perhaps and you're going to have to figure out whether you're gonna put a credits page in the back of your journal that says this is where I got a lot of these images here's a rabbit hole and I will warn you about this because I have been there done that and got lost for days of course we all know we see a link we can click on it this particular beautiful photograph is part of the prints and photographs division it is an awesome place to go to if you come over there you are going to have so many options to search you're going to have so many your mind will be blown by what is over here but you're gonna have a lot more difficulty looking for things that are in the public domain or that are okay for you to use I don't think the Library of Congress actually uses the word public domain that often so to start with I would probably stay within this free to use and reuse sets and here's another collection they have here it's called not an ostrich I think the idea was just unusual photographs a cat with a viking helmet on it very very old cavalry and one thing you have to be aware of when you are looking at things in these historical archives you're going to find photographs that are perhaps not culturally correct by today's standards this is part of our history so don't get all ticked off when you see something that may be of rubs you the wrong way they also have some travel posters these are a lot of fun to use and I have used some of these in my projects so again you would click on any picture and then it's going to take you to a larger image you want to see it closer you can do this and then to download you're going to come over here on the left and you make sure click this so if I just downloaded this one at 32 kilobytes its probably not going to be big enough for me to do very much for so I would again click that drop-down arrow and I would get a larger file they have in their free to use and reuse classic children's books how beautiful are these covers of these books look at this okay so the thing about these children's books is you get not just the book cover but you can actually download the entire book so the three bears it's a little bit different than downloading just an image because I don't think yeah you never get to the bottom where you will get that little drop-down arrow over here so when you see a children's book you like you click through click return to description and now you have the option to do a couple things so you can download it as a PDF which you may or may not get image resolutions that you like you can come over here and you can view this as HTML and now it's going to take you to a web page that's also going to show you the book but now you're going to get that little drop-down arrow so you can come over here to the arrow and you can choose to download but I believe that all that's going to get you is one page if you're doing it like this so if you want the entire book you're going to go through page by page but when you do that and you come to your arrow again you're going to get a larger size file and you're going to get really nice graphics that you can use and then a third thing you can do is if you're on this page here you can choose to download whatever page are on here you can download it here I would probably come over here to look at it as the view as HTML and then I would just go through the paid through the book page by page and I would down I would not do a PDF I I would rarely ever download a PDF that I want to be able to print in kind of equality I would come over here and I would choose TIF and then I would go to the next page come down here do the drop-down arrow I would choose TIF and I would go like that to go through the entire book so that's what I would do in order to download a complete children's book from this particular website one of the other categories they had baseball cards baseball season is started go Giants we are big fans here in this house and look at some of these great old baseball cards this is this is fabulous I love these I might make my son a baseball book one of these days with some of these old images so again just like anything else you're going to come over here you're gonna click on the image and it's going to tell you about the about the image and you can come over here and you can download it in the various sizes and then if you want to go down a rabbit hole you can click on any one of these links over here but remember once you get outside of this free to use and reuse collection that the Library of Congress has curated for you once you leave this part of the website then it's going to be doubly important for you to do the rights research to make sure that you are finding images that are okay for you to use that is the Library of Congress free to use and reuse curated collection they have done the hard work for you and put these together if you have any questions about using this website or any of the other websites we're going to visit on this journey let me know down in the comments and I will get back to you just as soon as I can next time we might go looking for some more modern photographs and images you can use or we might just fall down another vintage rabbit hole if you're having trouble finding a particular image to use around a certain theme that you're working on let me know down in the comments and I will see if I can help you track something down thanks so much for watching subscribe if you haven't already check out the rest of the videos in this playlist and I will see you next time bye for now

Channel: Susan Taylor Brown

Views: 14,791

Keywords:

Id: n4WG4b2u_ko

Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2019