Faculty

Free Images

Make sure to check the conditions of use. When you add the image to your site, please be sure to make it accessible by adding the "alternative text descriptions".

Ultimate Directory of Free Images

Lists and categorizes sources where you can find free images. Sources include:

Search Engines - Bing, Creative Commons, Google Images, HiveStock, and more
Large Crowdsourced Collections - Flickr, Wikemedia Commons
U.S. Government Collections - Visible Earth, and more
Unique Collections - Getty Images, Pixabay, Worldimages, and more
Specific Subjects - Animals, Nature, Hubble, and more
Clipart

Each source is listed with the following criteria:

Subjects - Does a site focus on specific genres of images, or is it a mass collection of various image types?
High Resolution - Does a site have high res images, choice of sizes...?
License - Some are Creative Commons (with variations on attribution and availability for commercial use), Public Domain, and others have unique licenses that maintain copyright while allowing users to download or embed photographs
Safety - Specifies if safe for student searches

Find an image

➥ Search the Ultimate Directory of Free Image Sources

ARTstor Digital Library

The Artstor Digital Library is an image database featuring an unparalleled range of images from some of the world's leading museums, photo archives, scholars, and artists in one easily-navigated repository. It is the most comprehensive image resource available for educational and scholarly use, with many rare and important collections available nowhere else.

More than two million images from 290 collections
- Art from leading museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Foundation, MoMA, Berlin State Museums, the National Gallery in London, and the Louvre
- Social documentary photography from Magnum Photos and Panos Pictures
- Manuscripts and early printed books from the Bodleian Library
More than 100,000 new images added each year
All content rights-cleared for educational use

How to Access ARTstor

Through the Foothill library, you can access the database and sign up for a free account.

Foothill Library
Select Articles & Databases
Find ARTstor from the alphabetical list
Login using your CWID and password that you use to log into MyPortal

World Images

The internationally recognized WorldImages database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project.

Selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in its historic collection of Internet materials
Contains approximately 100,000 images
Global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery
Images can be located using many search techniques on the left hand toolbar, from QuickSearch to Advanced and ADA Searches
Images are organized into over 900 portfolios that appear alphabetically in the Portfolio List

Find an image

➥ Search the WorldImages database

Additional Information

CONDITIONS OF USE: You are free to use these images for non-profit educational purposes, but we ask that you give credit to the copyright holders who retain rights to the images. These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.