Fair Use is built into the copyright law to address the tensions between the rights given to the copyright holder and freedom of speech. If you want to use copyrighted material without requesting permission from the copyright holder, you must engage in a four factor Fair Use analysis.
1) Purpose and character of the use
2) Nature of the copyrighted work
3) Amount
4) Market Impact
Aufderheide and Jaszi, in their book Reclaiming Fair Use, argue that while you need to ask yourself all four questions to conduct a Fair Use analysis, the courts have shown they are most interested in the answers to the following three questions (24).
Is your use transformative?
Is the amount you are using of the original copyrighted work appropriate to your use?
Is your use consistent with the norms of your community?
Wikimedia Commons - A growing database of millions of mostly freely-useable media files.
Pixabay– Stock photos available for download at high resolution
Stock Photos Beyond the Binary - Gender diverse stock photos available for download at high resolution
Women of Color in Tech Chat - Images of women and non-binary people of color in tech that are free for use with proper attribution
Nappy - Beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people for free
Muslim.Girl.com Collection from Getty - Images available for commercial use that represent modern Muslim women being themselves
CreateHer Stock - Authentic lifestyle and business stock photography featuring Black women
Burst - free high-res images
Images from the History of Medicine (National Library of Medicine)
Library of Congress American Memory Project -Free and open access to images that document the American experience.
New York Public Library Picture Collection | Digital Collections
Smithsonian Collection - Browse or search through selected images from the Collections of the Office of Imaging and Photographic Services. Included are images from current exhibits, Smithsonian events and historic collections.
Wellcome Images - Images span science, medicine,social sciences and include manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements. Every image is being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. These images can be used for educational, commercial or personal purposes, with an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London).
CDC Public Health Image Library (PHIL)
Created by a Working Group at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the PHIL offers an organized gateway to CDC's pictures for public health professionals, laboratory scientists, educators and students to use for reference, teaching and presentations.
Science.gov Image Search Select Multimedia to scientific images from the Library of Congress, NASA, NOAA, USDA, USGS and many other sources.
Digital South Asia Library
Historical maps, collections of photographs, and statistics relating to the Indian subcontinent.
ArtCyclopedia
A listing of art museums worldwide
Keyword search in Library Catalogs
To improve your search, include some typical keywords such as "pictorial works," "photograph," "exhibitions," etc. in your search. See the following examples:
When looking for images to include in a multimedia project, it is important to be aware of how resolution and compression can impact the aesthetic of your piece. Resolution is the number of pixels running horizontally and vertically in your image.
The standard resolution for a project that combines video, image and audio elements is HD (1920x1080). If you don't want your image to have artifacts, make sure the files you download are at least 1920 pixels x 1080 pixels. Using Advanced Search functions typically allow you to narrow your results by resolution.