I often get asked,

How do I find openly licensed images that I can use in my teaching materials, which I can also use towards the creation of OER?

Openly licensed image repositories are quite commonplace these days.  With a few billion people taking photographs around the world, one can quite easily find a picture to match any need.  As more and more amateur photographers are adopting open licenses such as Creative Commons we can easily find an openly licensed photo using the right search engines.

My personal favourite general image search engine is Compfight.com – compfight searches through Flickr (a widely adopted image hosting website) for images which were specifically designated under the Creative Commons(CC) license model, which means you can use these images under the approachable terms of the CC license.

Here I have searched for Fynbos which brings up almost 1000 openly licensed images which I can use in my teaching material and for the creation of OER.

CropperCapture[1]

If you are looking for images specific to Health Sciences the Gray’s Anatomy database of images in Wikimedia is a fantastic place to start.  All of these images appear to be in the public domain so should be easy to use and share.

CropperCapture[3]

Also for Health Sciences is the database of images from Patrick Lynch from Yale University which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.  You are therefor free to use these images as long as you give attribution to Patrick Lynch.

CropperCapture[2]

Finding Openly Licensed Images for Teaching and Learning Materials
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