10 links to cool, high-rez images

There are many places to get free images, but here are a few that provide mostly public domain photos of a high quality (but as always, check the terms of use). Many of these sites provide very large versions of their images, much larger than you would use in your slides. But that's OK. We can always reduce the size of the image in photo-editing software to match our slide dimensions (e.g. 800x600 or 1024x768, etc. at 72dpi), but we can't make a small JPEG larger without losing quality. And with larger images you have more choices when it comes to cropping the image to focus on particular elements, etc. Bookmark these below. I think you'll find you can kill a couple of hours as you go through all the interesting photos. (Go here on the NASA site to get the full story about the image I used for the slide above.)

• Earth Observatory (NASA). So much goodness here. I'm sure every teacher already has this site bookmarked.
• Visible Earth (NASA). This is a new collection of earth imagery from NASA. I particularly like this photo below. Amazing! Click on the image to get a much larger size.



• Great Images in NASA. A collection of about a thousand images of historical interest scanned at high-resolution in several sizes.
• NASA multimedia. Includes many high-quality photos as well.
• Photos by Astronauts. A gazillion cool images from space.
• NOAA Photo Library. Search the site or browse through "collections" at the top. Hundreds and hundreds of historical photos in there too.
• Uncle Sam's Photos. A directory of the U.S Government's free stock photo sites.
• The (US) National Archives. The National Archives has more than 30 million photos stored in several buildings in the US, many of them are available online. High-rez photos of The Constitution and The Bill of Rights, etc. as well as loads of photos from WWII in general and Japanese American Internment, and so on. I think I have seen some of the WWII images in Ken Burns' s documentary The War (highly recommended).


A young Japanese American waits with the family baggage before leaving by bus for an assembly center in the spring of 1942 (National Archive source).   

• WWII posters. Not too many high-rez images here, but very interesting. Sizes may be good enough for slides.
• Public Domain Pictures. A repository for free public domain photos. Easy to search. I love this one.

This may seem like an odd potpourri of links, but these are sites from which I have been gathering images lately and just thought you may be interested for future reference. If you know any other public domain sites that offer good quality in the form of historical archives, etc. please share your links in the comments section below. Much appreciated.

RELATED
• Where can you find good images? (PZ)
   

Comments

[Marco Bakera]

I would suggest stock exchange at http://www.sxc.hu/ as well . However thanks for the links.

[Stef]

I love that first pic - feeling alone? Great!!

Here is another - ahem, modest self-publicity - nice site for nature photography. Photos can be used for non-commercial purposes.

http://photoblog.la-famille-schwarzer.de/

Have a look in the archive for a quick overview.

[peter brantley]

There are many sources for public domain photographs. Two other wonderful examples:

American Memory, U.S. Library of Congress
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

Calisphere from the Univ. of California
http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/

[tartle]

I have used the visible earth one to talk about the urbanisation cultures... big cities in South America, big regions in US and Europe, thousands of villages in India, etc... very useful!

[Morten K. Holst]

Awesome stuff Garr, which is also why I'm going to criticize your writing and formatting a bit, as such a great content deserves better packaging.

1. The headline, "10 links to cool, high-rez images," is slightly misleading seeing that it actually means links to 10 images and not 10 images sources.
2. Why use bullets? (Especially when using a number in the headline). It would make more sense to use numbers.

Anyways, I might be off, having ESL.

[Jim]

Another great resource is morguefile.com. It's very similar in quality to the Stock Exchange site that Marco mentioned...both are great.

And Morten, I disagree about using a numbered list rather than bullets. I've always thought that a numbered list referred to items in a specific sequential order.

[.daniel]

http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/index.html

[Albert]

Thanks for the good article, supremely helpful! Images are getting more and more important, and I'm running out of free resources. ;)

Cheers,
Albert | UrbanMonk.Net
Modern personal development, entwined with ancient spirituality.

[Jason]

How about Wikimedia Commons? It's a smaller selection of images of varying quality, but there are some gems to be found here.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
or search using
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tangotango/mayflower/

enjoy,
-Jason

[Mark]

Thanks for a great list of resources. I also find http://flickr.com extremely useful - in particular because you can maintain a list of contacts who post images you like, and keep on online record of your "favorites".

[Slidebay]

I have written an image search interface to Flickr -- http://www.slidebay.com/Lookups/pixIndex/ -- that people might like to try. It looks for free (creative commons licensed) images that are interesting for presenters. The search results have image meta-data included so that Firefox users with Zotero installed -- http://zotero.org -- can keep a convenient record of images they like and later use it to build credits listings.

[Randy Wylde]

I recently ran across Wellcome Images: http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/News.html.

It is a great source of a specific body of material:

"Free, unlimited access to two thousand years of mankind and medicine in pictures made available through Creative Commons Licence. Teachers, students, academics, and the public can now download and use images depicting 2,000 years of mankind and medicine for free, thanks to this newly launched website from the Wellcome Trust. Launched on 15 June 2007, 'Wellcome Images' is the world's leading source of images on the history of medicine, modern biomedical science, and clinical medicine. All content has been made available under a Creative Commons Licence, which allows users to copy, distribute and display the image, provided the source is fully attributed and it is used for non-commercial purposes."

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[Rik]

www.sxc.hu

Amazing free stock photos at great resolution, even suitable for print work.

[Roy Tennant]

I have over 2,000 photos available in high resolution (4MP or better) freely available for personal use (for commercial use I charge). See http://FreeLargePhotos.com/

[nissim douek]

thanks for the links.
do you know, where can i get high res printable images of animation tv-serieses in general, and family guy in particular?
cheers, nissim