Free images

I like to incorporate images in blog posts, no matter what the post is about.

Sometimes, the blog post is the image or images and little or nothing else.  Other times, the image(s) is an illustration for the post.

As much as possible, the images that I use will be (1) my own, (2) public domain, or (3) licensed for the use.

Public domain images are images that have no copyright restrictions on them.  This may be because the copyright has lapsed or they have been placed into the public domain by their “author.”  By law, most photos made by the US government are public domain as “works” by our government cannot be copyrighted.

Most of the licensed images that I use are licensed free to the public under Creative Commons copyright licenses.  Under Creative Commons licenses, creators waive some of their rights under copyright and retain other rights.  There are several standard Creative Commons copyright-licenses.  (See https://creativecommons.org/)

A site that I’ve been using quite a bit recently is Pixabay, which has over 300,000 free photo, art, and vector illustrations.  All Pixabay images are available for use without cost or attribution, even for commercial applications.

The image at the top is from Pixabay.