The very best place to get Free Images for your website.

 

In this video we’ll talk about Creative Commons licensing, and the best way to search the entire openverse of images, over 700 million free digital assets.

Transcription

Hey folks! Welcome to another HeroPress Tip of the Week. This week we’re going to talk about Creative Commons licensing for media and the best place on the internet to find good images.

We’re here at the website for Creative Commons, which is a type of license which allows the artist to declare what license they want to be used on their material. So if you’re a photographer or a musician or any kind of digital artist, you can use the Creative Commons to declare to the world what can be done with your art. 

Let me show you what I mean. We’re going to click right here, “Use & Remix”, and then on the right, there’s this “licensing” link, we click that, and down here, we can choose a license. We’re going to choose features, some optional info, and then get the license. 

We click “get started”, and right here on the right we already have an existing license. This means that adaptions of the work can be shared and commercial uses of the work can be done. 

Now, let’s say you want people to be able to share it, but you don’t want commercial, so we’ll click “no” right here. And that axes out the dollars. But let’s say you don’t want adaptations. So people can see it and maybe even put it on the webpage, but they can’t change it. 

But let’s say you want them to be able to change it and create new art but they have to give the same license to others. So now we have these little icons. You can copy this HTML code, and it will create this license set for your website. So you can put up an image and put this license key on it and people know what they’re allowed to do with it. 

Now there are a wide variety of licenses for Creative Commons. As you saw, you can choose adaptations, or no, or maybe, commercial works or no. And then up here, there’s this public domain section also. 

CC0 means that the artists retains no rights whatsoever—people can take their image and do anything with it. And then there’s another one called the Public Domain Mark, which is similar, but subtly different. And you should look up the differences if you’re going to use this.

So all of this is pretty cool, licensing by the artists and all of that, but how do you find images? Well, artists can post their images anywhere they want on the internet. They could be on their own site or they could be on a public site like Flickr, flickr.com.

The U.S. government releases all of their images under a Creative Commons license, which means all of the cool NASA pictures that you see online, those are all available for your use. Pictures from all the government museums, those are all available for use. But the problem is that these images are scattered all over the internet on multiple different websites, which leads me to our next cool site.

This is called the Openverse at openverse.org. You can also get to it by going to wordpress.org, and under “Download & Extend” there’s open verse. Now, this searches across all of those Google websites. And it has access to more than 700 million creative works, which is crazy. 

So, for example, I’m going to search for “bicycle”. Here we are, a bunch of bikes. There are also some sounds. I can click to see all images over 10,000 results. It changes the UI a little bit. And you can see on each one what kind of license it uses.

Now, over here on the right, you can narrow your search. Let’s say you want to use it commercially. So I clicked that and now it reloaded but the top ones are commercial available, so you didn’t really see it. Let’s uncheck that. Let’s say “CC0”. There we go. Now these are images that you can use anywhere for any reason without any risk whatsoever. 

And as I mentioned, there are 700 million digital assets available in the search engine. So if you’re looking for good images Openverse is a great place. 

But I want to show you some other cool tricks related to WordPress specifically. This is a fairly vanilla install of WordPress. I don’t really have any plugins installed at all. If I say post, click “featured image”, I get my media library. That’s it.

However, if you click this + right here, you can choose blocks or patterns or media. And under media, you can see your media library, videos, audio, and then Openverse. So I’m going to search for “bicycle” here as well. And here are images. 

So let’s say I click one… Actually, let me share it with you. You can report images here. But if I click it, now it’s in my post. And update that real quick and go to my media library, and you’ll see that it actually downloaded it and put it in my media library. So I’m not reliant on Openverse being up all the time. All the images are on my own site and being served by my own site, which is great for owning your content.

Now, one more thing I want to show you. This site has Jetpack installed. And if Jetpack is installed, when you go to make a new post and then choose “featured image,” you have some options. Google Photos, Pexels Free Photos, and there’s Openverse. And here we can search for… oh it’s suggested “abstract”. Let’s choose “bicycle” again.

Now I noticed that there are some broken images here when I was testing for this video. I don’t know why that is. I think it’s a Jetpack bug. I also don’t like this UI as much. I don’t see as many. I liked the other one better up here. So I would search up here for it, add it to my media library and then use it as my featured image. Or just go here, save the image. 

If you click an image, there’s a link to get it. You can link to the author, you can get attribution if you want to. Since it’s CC0, you don’t have to but it’s polite. And often you can tell where the image is coming from. Let’s see. Get this image. Okay, so this one is on Flickr. And you can see all of Mussi’s images. 

So to sum up, Creative Commons is a license which allows the artists to declare how their images can be used and Openverse is a site that lets you search for those licensed images across the internet, across multiple websites. And then inside WordPress, you can find it either as a block addition or if you have Jetpack, you can use the media library. I hope you find this useful.