Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Legally Free Reference Photo Websites for Artists or Designers

 Artists and sometimes even experienced professionals such as Designers  will use photos that they find in the Internet to use for their next painting or drawing or designs. If you do this, very often you'll be breaking copyright law and infringing on someone else's intellectual property. 

You need to use photos that have a special license attached to them. The special licenses we want to look for are: 

1) Creative Commons Zero License (CC0) 

2) Attribution Licence 

With both of these licenses, you can make any kind of artwork you like from the photo without asking permission. You can sell your artwork or make prints of your artwork and sell those, or otherwise use your artwork in any commercial design.  The only difference is that the CC0 License doesn't require  your credit to  the owner of the photograph whereas  the Attribution License does.

Some of the sites I've listed below contain mostly CC0 images.The sites below are listed in the order of my own personal preference. 

Ready? Let's find you some inspiring free photos that you can use for your next masterpiece!


1) Pixabay     https://pixabay.com 


https://pixabay.com


This is my personal favorite website. I use this website  for a vast majority of my references. 

Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images and videos. All of the content in this website  are under  Creative Commons Zero License (CC0). A CC0 license means you are free to use any image on the site, even if you want to go on to sell your artwork in any commercial form. The site is very easy to browse and you can quickly check for the CC0 license next to the image.


2) Unsplash   https://unsplash.com



https://unsplash.com


If you are looking for stunning photographs from professional photographers then this is the place for you.  All the Images are under a CC0 license so you can browse with more confidence. The only downside is the Category page is bit limited and it is hard to spot at the first glance. Having said that their search tool is great and this site is best used for  inspiration rather than looking out  for  a very specific subject. 

3) Pexels    https://www.pexels.com


https://www.pexels.com


This site offers a huge collection of high-quality free stock photos from other sites around the web. Very easy to browse lots of images quickly and all are mostly published in the CC0 license. In this site the images are nicely laid out for fast browsing. The only downside is that they don't have a huge collection as Pixabay. 

4) Public Domain Pictures    https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/


https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/

This site offers over 324,878 photographs published under  Creative Commons Zero, with many of a very high quality. Each image has a Premium and Free download option. The Premium option allows you to download a higher resolution version but the free option is good enough for most  artists purposes. 

5) Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Wikimedia is a part of the Wikipedia family. It contains over 30million digital files that editors of Wikipedia can use, or that can be downloaded by anyone for  other uses. But you need to be careful even though it is on Wikimedia.  It offers the largest collection of free images online. If you are looking for something specific then you will probably find it here. Many images ( but not all) are published under the CC0 license or declared as public domain. Make sure you check.  Some disadvantages  using this site is you have to rely on their search box and you cannot browse by category. Not all images are in the public domain. Make sure to check the license under each image. 

 Please Note: In this list, I have not used  Wikimedia Commons that much mainly because of all these disadvantages that I have listed above. 

Let me know in the comments below if you found this useful and if you know of any other websites that I can add to my list. Thank you for reading!