Free Multimedia Material for Your Website

Images and videos are attractive elements for visitors of your website or blog. But just picking multimedia from others sites is not allowed, so you probably know.

Fortunately there are a couple of sites where you can get free pictures and free video footage with no copyrights.

If you want to embellish your blog or website with pictures and other multimedia you will have no problems finding material about any subject.

A Google Images search or Google Videos  can be sufficient. BUT on almost all the images and videos there is a copyright, which means you can’t just reuse this material.

You have to ask for permission – or in case of some stock photos – pay before you use it.

However, there are also websites that offer free material with no copyrights. Yey!

Creative Commons

You can start your search quest with Creative Commons (CC). This is an original American project for the promotion of ‘open’ content.

The project offers several types of licenses that allow for creative people to protect their work and give special permissions. A picture or video published under such a license may be used by others or be further processed.

In most cases when using a picture it is sufficient if you only mention the author’s name when spreading the material. If you want to find such CC material, please visit Creative Commons Search.

This is a meta-searcher that allows you to simultaneously search several specialized search engines (Yahoo Creative Commons search, Flickr Creative Commons search, Google Advanced Search with an option to set “results that are free to use or are free to be changed”).

A search term like “volcano”, for instance, will give you a ton of picture and video results.

Free Photos

A lot of sites offer so-called stock photos. These are photos that are either free or free to use with a mention of the photographers name.

In Every Stock Photo  you can search between more than five million photos. Stock.xchang which I am using a lot myself, offers more than 350,000 photos.

Similar sites are Morguefile and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Tip: A Search Engine that searches through all of these sites (and even a couple more) is PickFindr.

Free Audio and Video

Audio and video material is a bit more difficult to find.

All kinds of different sound recordings that have been recorded by volunteers can be found on Public Domain Sounds and Sound Bible .

Sound Transit specializes in mainly natural sounds.

Videos can be found on YouTube as well of course, but those movies are only meant to refer to or embed, not to download, edit and re-use on your own website.

If you do want to get videos for your own use then visit sites like Vimeo or the video section of Flickr and search for videos labeled with the tag  ‘Creative Commons’.

Film fragments (and even entire old films), TV shows and cartoons can be found at Open Source Cinema and the Internet Archive Moving Images Collection.

Happy browsing!

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