LibGuides: Photos, Image Collections, Textures: Free Image Databases

Image Search Engines

Flickr - Creative Commons
This photo sharing web site has millions of images for use under common usage licenses.
Creative Commons
Retrieves results from the creative commons Flickr bank as well as Google images that are "labeled for commercial reuse with modification" and more. Select the IMAGES link on the left hand menu after searching.
Compfight
Image search engine for high-resolution images with Creative Commons licenses.
Wunderstock
Photo library with access to thousands of high quality public domain photos, and Creative Commons images via Flickr. Edit photos before downloading, or submit your own to the platform.

Image and Media Generators

Generative Artificial Intelligence can help to produce images and media in response to prompts. Below you will find a list of image generators. For more information on using, evaluating, and citing AI tools, see our Generative AI Guide.

Adobe Firefly (beta)
AI tools for text to image, generative fill, text effects, generative recolor, 3D to image, and extend image (change the aspect ratio). Also included in Adobe Photoshop beta.
Bing Image Generator
Text-to-image generator powered by OpenAI's DALL·E 2. Free with a Microsoft account. Bing suggests the following template to get started: adjective + noun + verb + image/art style
Craiyon
Completely free text-to-image generator. Formerly called DALL·E mini but never associated with DALL·E or OpenAI. Designed by developer Boris Dayma.
DALL-E 2
OpenAI's freemium text-to-image generator. No longer free for new subscribers. Bing Image Creator is a free alternative.
Dream by WOMBO
Text-to-image generator. Free version generates one image at a time; paid version generates four options. Images are editable with additional text prompts.
FOTOR Free AI Image Generator
Freemium tool powered by the open source Stable Diffusion machine learning algorithms, including GAN and VAE, and Fotor's proprietary algorithm. 6 Best Prompts for AI Art You Should Try. Fotor also offers an AI photo editor that can enhance photos, remove image backgrounds, retouch portraits, erase unwanted objects from photos, and batch edit multiple photos.
Ideogram
Ideogram is an AI image generator that claims to have solved a problem that plagues AI image generators -- the ability to generate coherent text within an image.
Leonardo.ai
Bills itself as a free alternative to Midjourney, but users must sign up for the waitlist. Includes image-to-image prompt option.
Mage Space
Mage Space AI is an AI art generator that uses Stable Diffusion V1.5 and V2.1. It offers various features like text-to-image, image-to-image, and image-to-GIF conversions. The tool has a slightly complex interface, but it offers various image creation and editing features.
Midjourney
Midjourney is a self-funded, independent research lab whose text-to-image generator creates the highest quality digital art. No free tier and prompts must be entered via Discord.
Modyfi
Modyfi is a collaborative, AI-native, web-based design and image creation platform that combines the design and image making tools with AI-powered creative technology
Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion is a latent text-to-image diffusion model capable of generating photo-realistic images given any text input.

Adapted from "Generative Artificial Intelligence: Using Generative AI Tools" by UC San Diego: https://ucsd.libguides.com/AI/tools

Royalty Free Image Databases

Flickr - The Commons
Includes photography collections from participating institutions with "no known copyright restrictions".
Freedigitalphotos.net
Thousands of free low resolution images that can be used in coursework. Higher resolution images require a fee.
Freerange Stock
Thousands of free medium resolution images that can be used in coursework. Registration is required.
Image*After
This site offer 15,000+ free high resolution images and textures for commercial and personal use with daily additions.
Images Canada
Images Canada provides access to thousands of images of Canadian events, people, places and things.
iStockPhoto
Low fee, royalty free images from 70 000 photographers.
Morgue File
This site contains free high resolution digital stock.
Open Clip Art Library
"Openclipart is the largest collaboration community that create, share and remix cliparts. All cliparts are released to the Public Domain so they can be freely used in any project for free."
Pixabay
A repository of high quality public domain images, including photographs, drawings and vector art.
Unsplash
"Over 2 million free high-resolution images... fuelled by a community who gave their work for free in support of creatives everywhere."

Smithsonian Open Access

Smithsonian Open Access
Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

Using Internet Images

Many internet images can be used for educational purposes according to the new Fair Dealing guidelines. Check out our advice for using internet images for students and faculty.

You can copy and paste or link to Publicly Available Material (PAM) from the internet as long as it is for educational purposes and you follow the conditions below. It is your responsibility to know the terms of use for the material.

Conditions:

you have to cite the material
you can’t use the material if there is a lock on the website, like a password preventing the general public from accessing it
you can’t use the material if there is a “clearly visible notice” saying you cannot use the material and has to be more than merely a copyright symbol “©”
you can’t use the material if you know (or can logically guess) it was posted online without the consent of the copyright owner