How To Find Quality Public Domain Images & Photos

If you are setting up a Blog, Newsletter or Website you can find many images and photos that are licensed under Creative Commons, but they may have restrictions.

Another option is Public Domain, these images are usually free of even the smallest restrictions that may be in a Creative         Commons license.

Sometimes Public Domain gets a bad rap because it is associated with materials that are old. They were under a copyright at some time, but have existed for so long, the copyrights have expired.

While that may be true, and there are a lot of quality old, formerly copyrighted material that can be found, it is also true that much newer works are released freely into the Public Domain or as "Royalty Free" by the original artists everyday. These artists may be giving work away to build their reputation, trying to build traffic for their websites, or they just really believe in Free Culture and the Philosophy of the GNU Project.

Whatever their reasoning, the material is there to use, often under very minimal guidelines, you just need to find it.

Searching For Public Domain Images
 
(Image by a_glitch from Stock.XCHNG the leading FREE stock photo site!)