Photography

There are many places to find photographs online. Some of them are protected by copyright, others are public domain, and others use varying levels of creative commons licenses that sometimes do or don't allow reproduction. As always evaluate your sources and be aware of the rights usage for images you find online. Below are a list of some helpful online photography collections.

Depending on your topic, you may want to move beyond the normal search engine image search.

1. If you are looking for a specific piece, go to the museum's website. Here is an example. (look for the photographer Frederick Stone)
2. If you are needing images- try a creative commons search in Flickr or Morguefile.  What is nice about these types of files is that you may not have to ask permission to use them.  Their licensing tends to allow for more use and is less restrictive.
3. Other sites that might be helpful are stock.xchng and Compfight.
4. Other, non propriety image databases such as New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Keep in mind that search engines such as Google only scratch the surface of what is available online. What cannot be easily found with a search engine is often called the invisible web. For example, databases serve as gatekeepers that may prevent the web from crawling it. Also, depending on the algorithm used for searching, useful images might not rise to the top.

Examples for evaluating sources: