Finding Free Images for Presentations and Courses
By 
Perhaps you’re tired of the clip art you use in your presentations, or better yet, you feel energized about reducing the bullets, text and content on your slides and want to revamp your presentations and make them more focused and effective. Perhaps you just want to spruce up your blog posts. You need some good images. You can easily find great ones on Google, but recall that you shouldn’t necessarily be using those without express permission from the owner. What is one to do?
This post covers where to go to find free, (copyright-free and royalty-free) images for use in our presentations and courses. Ive included a list of sources for free images, and a couple for-pay sources.
First off, Microsoft has clip art and images you can access quite handily from within Powerpoint (or Word or Excel). I find images more effectively going directly to the Microsoft Office website using the IE web browser. This image search engine is more powerful than what is built in to office 2007 though it draws from the same image collection. I created a quick tour below on how to do this (click here for full size video).
Free Sites:
- http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/ (see video above!)
- good site from microsoft with some nice features like search “style”, “colors”, size etc., has basket and copy/paste function. No attribution required.
- http://www.google.com
- view this video and have fun finding legally usable images with Google
- http://www.getfreeimage.com/
- free, attribution to “getfreeimages.com” required
- http://www.photos8.com/
- http://www.compfight.com/
- a tidy site (no ads) that lets you search Flickr.com images that have creative commons license—here’s a helpful tutorial
- http://www.photoree.com/
- lets you save selections and search cc licences.
- http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
- identify the type of license you want and click the “see more” link to search photos with that license. A simple tutorial here.
- identify the type of license you want and click the “see more” link to search photos with that license. A simple tutorial here.
- http://www.vectorvaco.com/
- great source of silhouettes vector graphics—not as useful unless you know how to open and use a vector graphic
Paid Sites:
These image databases can be browsed/searched in your office, but must be downloaded with TLS account (see TLS) .
Possibly related posts: