How to find free music, images, and video you can use or remix in your own creative works

Creative Commons Resources

Below you will find a list of services and websites that provide content that you can use as building blocks in your own works.  From music, to video, to images, these services give you public domain and/or openly licensed (ie. Creative Commons licensed) content that you can reuse in your own work.

MUSIC / AUDIO

CCMixter :"This is a community music remixing site featuring remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses. Music on this site is licensed under Creative Commons licenses. You are free to download and sample from music on this site and share the results with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Some songs might have certain restrictions, depending on their specific licenses. Each submission is marked clearly with the license that applies to it."

OPSounds :"All sounds in the Opsound pool are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (a copyleft license similar to those used in the free and open source software communities) or are placed in the public domain (the license information for each song can be found under the song link."

Incompetech: "This one is super easy to browse through. You can search song by genre, feel or keywords. "By default, they are licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0. To use this license, simply attribute the music in your piece (website, film, phone system, etc.) as is reasonable to the medium. (more info on attribution). There is no cost to use music under the Creative Commons License."

SectionZ :" On SectionZ.com we use the audio specific licenses........Each of the Creative Commons icons means something regarding the type of conditions for each license. For an explaination of the Creative Commons icons that appear below"

{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}

Jamendo: Has a great deal of Creative Commons licensed music, and also sells various types of licenses to reuse music in certain ways.

Indabamusic.com: Perhaps a glimpse at the future of music, this site offers an opportunity for musicians worldwide to collaborate and create together.  Often holds contests and hosts a great deal of Creative Commons licensed work as well.

Freemusicpublicdomain.com:  This intuitive site offers a robust free music library, music for reasonable fees, as well as Creative Commons licensed works. This site is a good resource for personal or commercial use.

VIDEO
 
StockFootageForFree is a website dedicated to providing completely free stock footage from around the world that can be downloaded instantly and incorporated into any type of video editing project-personal or commercial. It seems you are required to create an account but it's worth the time. You can download each clip in either Standard Defintion (730x480 pixels) or High Definition(1920x1080 pixels) format. They are absolutely free and do not require you to give them credit. But hey, it's a nice thing to do.
 
US National Archives: http://video.google.com/videoadvancedsearch: You can use Google Video search to find works made by the Federal government which are almost all public domain and freely reusable. Use this search to find clips from NASA including lots of old newsreel footage.

VJVault.com: http://www.vjvault.com: VJ clip libraries are great places to find very short, often impressionistic, clips to use.

Blip.tv: http://spinxpress.com/getmedia: Blip.tv is a video sharing site which allows creative commons video to be shared. SpinXPress offers a search interface making it easier to find video content from blip.tv.

Flickr.com Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/?: In the advanced search options you can find creative commons videos and photos. Videos are in flash format, so you’ll need a tool like TubeTV (mac) or AnyVideoConverter (PC) to download them.

 
IMAGES
 
FLICKR has an entire section devoted to Creative Commons images arranged and searchable by Attribution.
 
Internet Archive Book Images:  Kalev Leetaru, an American academic, uploaded over 2.6 million of public domain images from a variety of books to Flickr.
 
EveryStockPhoto has a search engine that aggregates free-to-use, public domain, and Creative Commons photographs from a variety of sources
 
Stock.Xchng provides thousands of Free to use images that you can use with few restrictions.
 
 
 
 
MISC.
 
Internet Archive is a great place to find historical AUDIO, IMAGE, AND VIDEO files along with tons of other good stuff. The licensing varies from file to file but many will be either Creative Commons or in the Public Domain.
 
Public Domain Resources
{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}
Wikipedia has a great list of resources for freely reuseable public domain work and descriptions.  Funny enough we're able to reproduce this list below because the text is available from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 

Ordered by size of collection, largest first:

{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}
  • Wikimedia Commons hosts only freely licensed images, sound files, and other media. With over 12 million uploaded files, (as of January 2012), it is the largest free "images-only" repository. It contains many public domain images. Commons is the primary repository of media for all Wikimedia projects. Media on Commons can be used readily on all Wikimedia projects, just as if the media were uploaded to the projects directly. Media tagged with the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark can be found here
  • The New York Public Library has a rapidly growing database of public domain digitial images and documents.
     
  • Unsplash:Releases 10 CC0 Photos every 10 days!
  • Public Domain Photos - Free for commercial redistribution and alteration - As of January 1, 2011, public-photo.net contents were moved to a new domain: publicphoto.org. All photographs available on this site are 100% free for use. The site has more than 1,600 galleries consisting of over 19 thousand unique photos. At least three galleries--that is, up to 30-40 photos--are added to the site daily. Each image can be downloaded in at least four dimensional sizes: thumbnail, normal, large and very large. Photos are up to 4752 x 3168 maximum resolution. (old domain: moka.t2i.info - Moka Gallery)
  • Google images hosts a large repository of LIFE images; Time Warner, Inc. claims blanket copyright to everything but this is simply untrue. (see here and also see here) Anything more than 120 years old (i.e. - before 1889) is generally safe. (exception is if the original author died less than 75 years ago--45 years after these PD pictures have been taken--, the author lived in a state with Common law copyright, and the name of the author is known---and in that case Time itself is most likely in copyright violation.) You must remove the watermark if you use the larger image.
  • TotallyFreeImages.com - Totally free public-domain images - This is the largest archive on the Internet with over 494,000 hi-res professional-grade royalty-free images, 100% public-domain and acceptable for use with Wikipedia.
  • Photos Public Domain Thousands of high quality public domain photographs free for any use, with no restrictions. Collections included are: textures, animals, nature, and a variety of stock images for any use, including commercial.
  • Free Photo Gallery Public Domain Images - Free stock and recreational photos licensed under Creative Commons; may be used for commercial and non-commercial purposes.
  • Picdrome - growing Public Domain picture collection: no copyright, licensed under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication. All items are free to download and use, without restriction.
  • Pixabay - Public domain images without any limitation (private and commercial use)
  • / Alegri Photos - Public domain and Creative Commons images
  • Public-Domain-Photos.com
  • Public Domain Cliparts Over 8000 public domain cliparts.
  • 4 Free Photos Public domain images.
  • Free Stock Image Site Collection of public domain stock images.
  • Montenegro Photo Free images of Montenegro (Former Yugoslavia).
  • FreeStockPhotos.biz A large collection of Public Domain, GNU, Creative Commons & custom licensed stock photos and clip art.
  • BestPhotos.us Search millions of public domain photos or browse the best
  • Ars Publik - A great collection of public domain images from around the web, hand-selected for use in web and graphic design.
  • Public Domain Pictures A large collection of high quality pictures for free. Possibility to contact the authors for original files.
  • http://ushistoryimages.com/ - A growing collection of free images related to United States history.
  • RepublicDomain.com is a place for free public domain photos and desktop wallpapers.
  • Public-domain.zorger.com features scans of art from pre-1922 books and various photos, free for any use]
  • Easy Stock Photos - Royalty free stock photos, pictures, images and information in the public domain - Collection of public domain photos organized by category in image galleries.
  • Phototeria.com The site presents a large Collection of Public Domain images only. It's very easy to navigate Phototeria.com which benefits not so experienced users or young folks.
  • Reusable Art - An ever-growing collection of vintage drawings, illustrations and photographs from books, magazines and other printed materials. Original publication information is included with each image for copyright verification. All images meet or exceed the Berne Convention standard for a creative work to be in the public domain.
  • Karen Whimsy's Public Domain Images - Scans of engravings and other artwork from a personal collection of old books, magazines, and post cards. Updated regularly.
  • Word Processor Clipart - Public Domain clipart optimized for use in word processors. Browsable via site treeview and thumbnail pages. Complete collection also downloadable from ibiblio.
  • Project Gutenberg - 12,000+ books, only a few illustrated, but the number of illustrated books increases from week to week. There are thousands of PD images available.
  • Open Clip Art - This project is an archive of public domain clip art. The clip art is stored in the W3C scalable vector graphics (SVG) format.
  • clker - Easy to search public domain images, directly usable in openoffice.org
  • Open Domain - public domain images from various sources in one-a-day blog format.
  • PD Photo - Large collection of mostly public domain photos. Read the license for each picture before use; also, model releases may not have been obtained for all photos.
  • Logo Design Web Stockphotos - Small but growing public domain stock photos released by photographer.
  • http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/public/public_domain.htm - Scanned and colorised etchings claimed to be PD images.
If any page or image seems missing, replace http://www.sru.edu/depts/cisba/compsci/dailey in its URI with http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/
{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}

Subject-based Collections

Ordered by subject, alphabetically:

Art

Note: Accurate photographs of two-dimensional visual artworks lack expressive content and are automatically in the public domain once the painting's copyright has expired (which it has in the US if it was published before 1923). All other copyright notices can safely be ignored.

  • http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/
  • http://siris-artinventories.si.edu/ - The Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) is an American art catalog compiled by the Smithsonian Institute. It has many reproductions of American paintings. However, it is known to have a number of factual errors, so it should be used with great care.
  • http://www.artrenewal.org/pages/artistindex.php - Images of the works of more than 2,600 realist painters, many in the public domain; check catalogue for dates of works and artists. Note: Accurate photographs of two-dimensional visual artworks lack expressive content and are automatically in the public domain once the painting's copyright has expired (which it has in the US if it was published before 1923). All other copyright notices can safely be ignored.
 
 

Value legal services for internet users and creators?  Support them.

Find additional articles by