15 Sites For Finding Free Images in the Public Domain

Images are pivotal to a good website – without them your site will be a wall of uninviting text.

Finding great images for your site is relatively easy as there are many, many sites out there that supply paid for and “free” images. Often though you either don’t have the cash, the desire to spend the cash or don’t want to have to add in attribution all the time.

That’s where Public Domain images come in. These rare gems have been handed out by the creator to the world at large. Mostly they are covered under a licence such as the Creative Commons CC0 licence which says:

You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

You can pretty much do anything with these images, though some sites do add extra terms such as not to be used for pornographic purposes, be sold on stock websites or not to claim ownership of the image. Nothing that will generally affect you in your day to day usage of the images.

There is a problem though, most public domain photos are crap! Honestly they often come across as badly taken holiday photos.

That’s why I’ve compiled a list of some of the best public domain image sites available today.

Public Domain Pictures

Public Domain Pictures

Unsplash.com

Unsplash

Pixabay

A mixture of public domain images and links to Shutterstock, though the premium links are marked so you can tell the difference.
Pixabay

SplitShire

SplitShire

1 Million Free Pictures

One_Million_Free_Pictures

Gratisography

Gratisography

Little Visuals

Landscapes, buildings and textures sent to you via email every week. How handy is that?
Little Visuals

New Old Stock

A curated list of vintage photos all sourced from Flickr.
New Old Stock

Pickup Image

Pickup Image

Public Domain Archive

Public Domain Archive

Morguefiles

Morguefiles

Jay Mantri

Jay Mantri

Magdeleine

Not all the photos on this site are CC0 licensed so just be careful about that.
Madeleine

The British Library

The British Library uploaded over a million scans of old books and manuscripts, to make them freely available for the public. While not suitable for everything, there is such a wide range of content that something could be of use.
British Library

Internet Archive Book Images

Need more old images? How about over 2 million pictures ranging from the 1500’s to 1922?
Internet Archive Book Images