Free photos for lessons on Flickr

Some people have been asking about how to find raw materials to use for writing lessons. Nice photos or other artwork go a long way to making materials look professional and appealing to students. I’m a horrible artist, so I have to copy. In the past, I used to use Google Image Search, but these days I use the Flickr photo sharing site to find photos that look good and are free to use.

Why are they free? Flickr makes it easy for photographers to license their photos for very liberal use and reuse under Creative Commons licenses. Try the Creative Commons Search Page on Flickr to find most anything you might need a photo of. You are pretty much free to copy, alter, and re-publish the photos (and there were a couple of million last time I looked) as long as you aren’t making money (and sometimes even if you are).

How can that work? Flickr has a very simple outline of your rights to use images under Creative Commons (CC). Or, if you really want to know the nitty-gritty, go direct to Creative Commons for more information.

By Premshree Pillai

By Snowy’s Good Things

By Slice

It took me all of a minute to find these three photgraphs, another minute to download them, but several minutes of cutting and pasting to give the authors due credit for their work. That’s the price of free photos that don’t violate intellectual property policies (even if your school has not yet mandated one). Well worth it in this case. You, me, and anyone else are free to use these images as we like, as long as we give the artists credit, pass the resulting work along under the same terms, and don’t charge for them.