Find Free Images With CC Search
Finding the perfect design for your next blog post or meme can be tricky. And while there are many sites you can use to search for images that you are legally allowed to reproduce and / or modify, the latest addition to my list is CC Search , a Creative Commons tool that is now officially out of beta.
Jane Park, director of product and research for Creative Commons, notes that the new search tool indexes nearly 300 million images, and many more in development – Creative Commons has set itself the lofty goal of indexing over 1.4 billion licensed works.
“CC Search searches 19 collections for images taken from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset, including cultural works from museums (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art), graphic designs and works of art (Behance, DeviantArt), photographs from Flickr. and the CC0 3D Design Starter Kit from Thingiverse, ” she writes .
The beauty of CC Search is that whatever you’re looking for is free to use as long as you comply with whatever Creative Commons license option is used in the image.
This is easy to figure out. Start by searching for whatever you want with CC Search. You can then use the Filter button to highlight images using a specific license (if you don’t understand each one, I recommend linking to that Creative Commons license while you browse through the filter options).
Don’t forget about the I want what I can … drop-down list, which allows you to filter images that you can use commercially or modify depending on what you are trying to do. (Choosing either option makes the “license” filter gray – think of it as a simplified way of understanding what the various licenses allow you to do.)
You can also limit yourself to just the image providers themselves. This is useful if you prefer to view more amateur-captured Flickr images than, say, laptop images in a museum (to use my example from the screenshot).