Free multimedia material for your website
Images or even videos can give your site or blog that extra touch. However, you can’t just pluck multimedia files from other sites and use them. Fortunately, there are sites offering copyright-free material free of charge.
Plenty to choose from
If you want to spruce up your blog or site by using images or other multimedia elements, there’s no lack of material. Just launch a query at, for instance, Google Images (http://images.google.co.uk) or Google Videos (http://video.google.co.uk). However, most of the images and videos you will find there are copyrighted, which means that you’re not allowed to use them just like that. You should ask permission expressly beforehand, and in the case of commercial material you should pay the appropriate fee. However, there are several websites where you can find rights-free material.
Creative Commons
It’s best to start your search at Creative Commons (CC) (http://creativecommons.org). This originally American project aims to encourage the use of “open” content. The project offers various types of licences which enable creative people to release their licensed work for certain types of reuse. An image or a video clip published under such a licence may be used or edited by others. Typically, you only need to mention the name of the original creator in order to be allowed to use the material. To find CC material, use the Creative Commons Search engine (http://search.creativecommons.org). This meta searcher scavenges various specialised search sites simultaneously, such as Yahoo! Creative Commons Search, Flickr Creative Commons Search, Google Advanced Search (with as search option “Results that are free to use, share or modify, even commercially”). Our query volcano produced several hundred images and videos.
Free photos
Many sites offer so-called “stock” photos. They are photos which are free to use or which simply only require you to mention the photographer’s name. EveryStockPhoto (http://www.everystockphoto.com) can give you access to more than five million photos, whilst Stock.XCHNG (http://www.sxc.hu) offers over 350,000. Comparable sites are MorgueFile (http://morguefile.com) or FreeDigitalPhotos.net (http://www.freedigitalphotos.net).
Tip. A handy search engine which searches all these sites (and several others) in one go is PicFindr (http://www.picfindr.com).
Free audio and video
Free audio and video material is harder to find than photos. Sound recordings made by volunteers can be found at Public Domain Sounds (http://www.pdsounds.org) and SoundBible (http://soundbible.com). SoundTransit (http://soundtransit.nl/search/) specialises in the sounds of nature.
Videos are obviously to be found by the millions at YouTube, but these videos are not meant to be downloaded, edited and presented on your own website. To download videos which you’re allowed to use, check out sites such as Vimeo (http://vimeo.com) or the video section of Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/) and look for videos labelled with the Creative Commons tag.
Tip. Many film fragments (even full old films), television shows and cartoons can be found at Open Source Cinema (http://www.opensourcecinema.org) and the Internet Archive Moving Images Collection (http://www.archive.org/details/movies).
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