Best Sources of Free Pictures (Photos, Clip Art, and Other Royalty Free Images)

Pixabay is undoubtedly the best place to find completely free photos in high resolution right now (2018). A huge community of users is contributing the photos and other images to the site on daily basis and it really offers a very comprehensive selection for most topics. Everybody can become a member and upload his or her work, but all presented images are handpicked to guarantee an appropriate quality. Most images are available in high resolution, so you can even use them in very demanding projects like Print on Demand Services.

Each of the images uploaded in Pixabay is free, you can do with it whatever you want (reasonably) and no attribution is required. Of course, you can contribute to the site in several ways - with backlinks, donations, your own photos or clipart, ...

Pixnio works on the similar principle as Pixabay but I believe it has fewer contributors and a smaller portfolio. Images on this site are on average of slightly lesser quality. They can still be very useful, especially if you are looking for originality. You can download pictures (all Public Domain), or upload yours (thus explicitly giving a permission to anybody to use them for anything he or she wants).

Unsplash is another great source of free images, especially photos. It's another community of photographers who are willing to donate their work in Public Domain, helping you to create more attractive articles on your blogs and making the Web a better place.

Openclipart is an Open Source project where everybody can create an account and contribute an original clipart or a derivation of another Open Source Clipart which automatically falls under the Open Source license as well. Simply speaking this license gives you a possibility to use such clipart on your commercial and non-commercial projects. Attribution is not required but will be appreciated as always.

Clker is more a one-man band - it copies clip art from various places, including Openclipart, but has often much better searchability. This means you can find the same clip art on both pages, but in most cases, it will be easier to find it here.

There are many other sites claiming to offer free clip art. But be careful: u huge percent of so-called free clip art is free for non-commercial use only. If you want to place any of these on Wizzley, for instance, even if your article is purely educational, Wizzley will show commercials somewhere on the page and this immediately moves your articles with all its elements into commercial category.

https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/about-us/

https://www.vectorportal.com/free-vector/public-domain/

Internet became bigger than life in only a few years after the first computers were connected to each other. Several ideas for preserving the knowledge of humankind and even giving it to the public came to fruition and Wikipedia is probably the most popular one of all.

Wikimedia is part of Wikipedia project and consists of millions of images (among other items) which are licensed in different ways. Many of them are in Public Domain, but it's your job to find which are in Public Domain (what is not necessarily true in different countries!), which require attribution and which are too iffy to be used in your project. All in all, Wikimedia can be a great resource for many interesting projects. As a bonus, it offers numerous promising links to valuable resources of information that can ultimately help you make an article even better.

Archive is another community of contributors. It's based on numerous Public Libraries although everybody can contribute to it. You'll find millions of scanned books, many in Public Domain, with spectacular graphics available to use in your articles. I wrote hundreds of articles with images coming from Archive, many of them being presented to the web users for the first time, thus giving me a competitive edge, but I have to warn you.

It's your responsibility to check the copyright which is often unclear for a simple reason; copyright laws had gone through many changes in recent decades and many artists are not credited at all! Archive is one of the best sites in the world, probably by far the best among the sites average users never heard of, yet I can't recommend it to the beginners.

Illustrations are among my passions, so I use them in my articles frequently. Public Domain illustrations are available in various places, including at some of above mentioned (and a few will follow), but there are two more, both specialized in illustration only:

https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/albums/with/72157639959761466

The later is a profile of British Library, created in 2017 to offer thousands of quality illustrations older than a century to the people who would otherwise never had a chance of seeing them. Enjoy their beauty and try to include at least one in one of your next projects.

This example comes from one of such dedicated sites: Hansel and Gretel by Arthur Rackham.

Sometimes a photo, a clipart or other still image won't do the trick. An animated GIF, what is nothing else than several images connected into a short movie (often lasting less than a second), might be the thing you need for your web article.

On the other hand, you should know GIFs are typically pretty large files, hijacking your bandwidth and prolonging your load time what are two bad news which should be taken into consideration. 

Here are several sources of animated GIfs in Public Doman:

https://giphy.com/explore/public-domain

https://tenor.com/search/public-domain-animated-gifs-gifs

They are mostly aiming at artists, researchers, and similar highly demanding and relatively specialized groups, but such collections can be a precious source of knowledge and graphic material for just about everybody.

https://www.nga.gov/

https://library.unc.edu/find/digitalcollections/

I decided to create one more group as a valuable resource of free pictures. These pages were made by enthusiasts who were looking for photos or clipart on a specific topic. You have to have a bit of luck to find such page offering exactly what you are looking for, but if you manage to do that, a lot of work and research had been already done, so you can just lay back and enjoy using graphics in next pages:

A collection of Fall Leaves:

https://topbeautifulplaces.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/fall-leaves-tours/

Free Clipart on Eastern Theme:

http://reallycoolblog4you.blogspot.com/2017/04/free-easter-pictures.html

Free Photos of Golden Retrievers:

https://neptune8th.wordpress.com/2015/11/19/images-of-golden-retrievers/

All Illustrations from the Series The Wizzard of Oz:

https://reallycoolblog4you.blogspot.com/2014/04/wizard-of-oz-books.html

Before using any of the images you still need to optimize them for the web to take full advantage of this important element of every article.

I wrote a full article with useful and easy tips on the subject:

https://wizzley.com/optimize-images-for-web/