22 Free Public Domain Images Sites

Wikimedia Commons is a huge free media repository with well over 130 million images, audio files, and videos under public domain or open licenses. It is especially strong for encyclopedic and cultural content, including contributions from many museums and archives. The site is operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation and populated and curated by a global community of volunteers.

Openverse is a search engine that aggregates more than 800 million openly licensed and public domain images and audio files from dozens of sources. It lets you filter by license type, use case, and source so you can reliably find media suitable for commercial reuse. Openverse is a WordPress project stewarded by the WordPress Foundation and developed by the broader WordPress open source community.

The Public Domain Review curates public domain images, texts, films, and audio from libraries and archives, with a focus on unusual, historic, and scholarly material. Its image collections are small but very carefully selected and annotated, which is useful when you need context rather than generic stock imagery. The site is produced by The Public Domain Review Community Interest Company, an independent not for profit publisher that originally grew out of Creative Commons and Open Knowledge circles.

PublicDomainPictures.net offers hundreds of thousands of user submitted photos that contributors have released for unrestricted public domain use. It covers many everyday subjects such as landscapes, textures, backgrounds, and simple product-style shots. The site is operated by Bobek Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales that owns and maintains the PublicDomainPictures.net platform.

PublicDomainVectors.org specializes in vector clip art, icons, and illustrations whose uploaders have waived their rights to the extent possible under law. Files are downloadable as SVG, EPS, AI, and other vector formats, which makes them ideal for editing in design software. The site is run as PublicDomainVectors.org by its operators, who provide the platform and state that contributors dedicate their images to the public domain.

Openclipart is a long running repository of vector clip art that artists have explicitly placed in the public domain. It offers hundreds of thousands of simple icons, symbols, and illustrations suitable for infographics, interfaces, and educational materials. Openclipart is owned and hosted by the Fabricatorz Foundation and powered by a community that traces its roots to the early Open Clip Art Library founded by Jon Phillips and Bryce Harrington.

Rawpixel maintains a substantial public domain collection alongside its commercial stock library, including vintage book illustrations, Japanese prints, botanical plates, and historical engravings. You can filter by “public domain” within the Rawpixel interface to stay inside truly no-rights-reserved content. Rawpixel is operated by RAWPIXEL LTD, a UK based company with creative teams in the United Kingdom and Asia.

Picryl aggregates public domain images from many institutions and government archives into a single search platform. It is particularly strong for historical photographs, posters, and maps drawn from sources such as the Library of Congress and other national libraries. Picryl is developed and operated by GetArchive LLC, which markets it as one of the largest public domain image search engines available.

Museo is a visual search engine that connects directly to open access image APIs from museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Rijksmuseum, Harvard Art Museums, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library. It returns high quality art and historical imagery that is typically public domain or under very permissive licenses, with links back to the source institution for license confirmation. Museo is an independent, open source project run by a small developer team that aggregates these museum collections into one clean, ad free interface.

Europeana is the European Union’s central digital portal for cultural heritage, aggregating tens of millions of records from museums, archives, and libraries across Europe. Its search tools allow you to restrict results to public domain or CC0 images, which is essential when you need content that is completely free to reuse. The platform is operated by the Europeana Foundation under contract with the European Commission, in partnership with a network of national and domain aggregators.

The Library of Congress offers Free to Use and Reuse sets that highlight images, posters, maps, and other items whose rights have been cleared for broad reuse. These curated sets sit on top of a much larger digital collections environment that includes millions of digitized items documenting U.S. history and culture. The site and the rights statements are managed by the Library of Congress, which is the national library of the United States and the largest library in the world.

Smithsonian Open Access provides more than five million 2D and 3D digital items that the Smithsonian has dedicated to the public domain under CC0. The collection covers art, science, design, history, and culture from 19 museums, nine research centers, and the National Zoo, and all open access items can be downloaded and reused without permission. The initiative is managed centrally by the Smithsonian Institution as part of its digital strategy, and it explicitly uses the Creative Commons Zero public domain tools.

The Met’s Open Access program lets you download high resolution images of hundreds of thousands of artworks whose images are in the public domain. You can filter the online collection to show only Open Access items, and those images can be used, remixed, and shared for any purpose, including commercial projects. The program is operated by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and uses a CC0 dedication for its public domain images.

Rijksmuseum’s Collection Online and its Rijksstudio feature give you access to high resolution images of Dutch Golden Age paintings, prints, decorative arts, and more. Many of these works are in the public domain and can be downloaded in very large formats suitable for print and design projects. The digital collection and open access policy are administered by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has put hundreds of thousands of items online.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC provides an Open Access program that includes hundreds of thousands of high resolution images of works in the public domain. These files can be downloaded without registration and used freely, including for commercial purposes. The open access initiative is managed by the National Gallery of Art, which also shares many of these images to Wikimedia Commons to broaden reuse.

The Art Institute of Chicago marks certain works in its online collection as public domain and makes high resolution files available for download under CC0. You can filter the collection by public domain status, making it easy to see which images are truly unrestricted. This open access policy is administered by the Art Institute of Chicago as part of its broader digital collections program.

The Cleveland Museum of Art offers an Open Access program that makes high resolution images and metadata for a large portion of its collection available for unrestricted use. Open access items are clearly labeled and can be freely copied, modified, and commercialized. The program is run by the Cleveland Museum of Art, a major U.S. institution with a globally significant collection and a strong digital engagement strategy.

The NYPL Digital Collections include hundreds of thousands of items that the library has identified as public domain, from photographs and maps to illustrated books and posters. There is a dedicated view for public domain items, which can be downloaded in high resolution without sign-in. The site is operated by the New York Public Library, one of the largest public library systems in the United States.

DigitaltMuseum aggregates digitized collections from museums across Norway and Sweden, including photographs, artifacts, design objects, and works of art. Many items carry public domain or similarly permissive rights statements that allow wide reuse, although you should always check the rights field on each record. The service is operated by KulturIT in collaboration with participating Nordic museums that manage their own content and metadata.

Flickr Commons hosts historical photography from more than one hundred libraries, archives, and museums that want to share public photo collections. The goal is to increase access to publicly held images and invite the public to tag and describe them, with many records labeled as having no known copyright restrictions. The Commons program was launched by Flickr in partnership with the Library of Congress and is now supported by the nonprofit Flickr Foundation together with participating institutions.

Pixabay is a very large free stock media library that now contains more than five million photos, illustrations, vectors, videos, and audio tracks. Although the site originally used the CC0 public domain dedication, most current material is available under a custom Pixabay Content License that still allows broad commercial reuse but restricts reselling unaltered files and certain sensitive uses. Pixabay operates as a brand of Canva Germany GmbH after being acquired by Canva, while continuing to run with its own site and community.

Unsplash provides a huge library of high quality, curated photographs contributed by a large community of photographers and downloadable for free. Its custom Unsplash License allows copying, modifying, and using the photos commercially, with limitations on selling unaltered copies or building a competing stock service. Unsplash continues to operate as a standalone brand and platform but has been a subsidiary of Getty Images since its acquisition in 2021.