12 Open Images & Videos

Media that you find online may be copyrighted, so even though it’s available to everyone, its copyright may not allow you to freely use it. However, you’re in luck because there are plenty of places to find openly licensed images, videos, and more! Below is a list of just some of the options for finding free and open content.

Collections of Various Media

• CC Search: A federated search tool for finding content available under a CC license (includes openly licensed still images, music, and videos across several repositories, including YouTube, Google, SoundCloud, and more).
• Digital Public Library of America: Public domain images, videos, recordings, and texts.
• Free Music Archive: Public domain and CC-licensed music and sound bytes.
• Library of Congress: Millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps, and manuscripts—all in the public domain for use and reuse by all.
• Vecteezy: Free vectors, stock photos, stock videos, and more.
• NASA Archive: Videos and images from NASA.
• Pixabay: Over 4.6 million high quality stock images, videos, and music shared by a talented community.
• University of Texas Maps: Map collection website.

Collections of Images

• Google Advanced Image Search: Use the Usage rights filter at the bottom of the page to find images with the Creative Commons license.
• Wikimedia Commons: Public domain and CC-licensed images and figures.
• Burst: Free stock photos and royalty-free images.
• Flickr: Explore Creative Commons images.
• Morguefile: Free high resolution digital stock photographs and reference images for either corporate or public use.
• Getty Institute Open Images: Searchable database of Creative Commons licensed images.
• Edupic Graphical Resource: Free photographs and graphics for education.
• The Noun Project: Icons and photos for everything.
• StockSnap.io: Free stock photos.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: High-quality open images from the Met.
• Unsplash: A collection of visuals.
• World Images: A database providing access to the California State University IMAGE Project that contains approximately 100,000 images, is global in coverage, and includes all areas of visual imagery.

Collections of Images of People

• #WOCinTech: A collection of open images of women of color in tech.
• Allgo Plus-Size: These photos are available for all uses and feature plus-size people.
• Disabled And Here: A disability-led stock image and interview series celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).
• Images of Empowerment: A free library of images celebrating women’s lives and their work in 13 countries around the world.
• Nappy: Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free.
• Picnoi: A collection of stock image photography that you can easily search and find diverse multi-racial images.

Collections of Videos

• How to find Creative Commons materials using YouTube.
• A/V Geeks: An ephemeral film collection.
• Ted: A collection of videos that aims to foster the spread of great ideas. Check the license. TED encourages its participants to share their talk under the Creative Commons license CC BY–NC–ND 4.0 International, but some videos may not be under such Creative Commons license.
• Vimeo: Browse the Creative Commons licensed videos on Vimeo.

Add Image Alternative Text

Remember to make all images included in your materials accessible. This requires adding alternative text, which can be done in a variety of ways depending on the tool you’re using. Adding alternative text to an image ensures that it can be read by more than just sighted individuals. It should describe the content of the image if that image delivers content rather than just serving as a decorative image. If the image does not provide content, it can usually be marked as a “decorative image,” including in your Canvas Webcourse. Guidelines suggest limiting your alternative text to about 120 characters. If you’re inserting a graph, infographic, or other visual that includes lots of detailed information, you can write a more descriptive caption for that image.

If you’re adding an image in Canvas, you can click on the image, click Image Options, and then write the alt text in the textbox provided or check the decorative image box. If you’re adding an image in Pressbooks, you can click on the image and click on the pencil icon to edit the alternative text. Other platforms may have other variations of an edit image button to click to add alt text.

References

Paradiso, J. R., & Luken, D. (n.d.). Introduction to open education (Adapted from Parsons, J., OER specialist training manual). Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0.