There are many freely available image databases online that have varied licenses. Be sure to always check the licenses. Some are free to use however you want, some require attribution, some are restricted to non-commercial, and there are other potential parameters.

Please contact us if you have any questions!

General Images

General Images

  • Creative Commons – providing resources, including images, under simplified licensing agreements, allowing users to easily understand how these resources can be shared.
  • PixaBay – millions of royalty-free images, videos, music, sound effects, and GIFs.
  • UnSplash – over 6 million images provided by contributors for open access use.
  • Dreamstime – a stock image database of over 280 million stock photos, illustrations, video, and audio. Some items do require purchase, while many others are freely available.
  • Pexels – 1+ million royalty-free images, licensed under Pexels’ own license.
  • National Gallery of Art – open access images and works of art from the Gallery’s permanent collection, available for free download.

Medical Images

National Library of Medicine Image Resources

  • Open-i – an open access biomedical image search engine that searches images from PubMed Central articles as well as several special image collections. It allows for substantial search customization via filters (specialties, image type, license type, etc.)
  • MedPix – an open access online database of medical images, teaching cases, and clinical topics.
  • The Visible Human Project – created publicly available three-dimensional representations of a male and a female human body. These images include cross-sectional cryosections, CT, and MRI images.
  • National Eye Institute Media Library – provides images and other media from multiple categories: eye exams and medical care, infographics, anatomy, laboratory, eye disease simulations, etc.
  • NLM Digital Collections – allow searching and browsing numerous document collections: Images from the History of Medicine, World War 1, Medicine in the Americas 1610-1920, and many more. You can also search the collections for only images.
  • National Cancer Institute Visuals Online – offers a collection of featured medical images in several collections: science & technology, childhood cancer, Spanish-language images and diagrams, anatomy, historical images, and B-roll videos. The full collection is also searchable.
  • National Institute of General Medical Sciences – a searchable collection of scientific photos, illustrations, and videos. The images and videos in this gallery are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0. This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as you credit and license your new creations under identical terms.
  • Centers for Disease Control: Public Health Image Library (PHIL) – offers a number of topical image collections on topics like influenza, bioterrorism, lab science, and more. Also of interest are image subsets selected for their interest to particular audiences: health care providers, teachers & trainers, librarians & researchers, students, consumers, and more.

Other Collections