Remember that you need rights to the images you use on your web site. Even if you take the photos, if there are recognizable people in the images you need to get their permission to use the image publicly. Be very careful if your photo includes the artwork around campus - the artists have full rights to the use of these images.
This is the best place for pictures of campus and campus dignitaries. University Communications can help you with these.
The Wikimedia Commons contains more than 8 million freely usable images, audio and video files and is the main source of images for Wikipedia. Although almost all images are free to use without permission, some may be subject to conditions such as attribution or non-commercial-only use. Check the license of each image before use.
ARTstor has images for education and scholarship use. You can search and browse approximately 550,000 images contained in over 50 collections within the ARTstor Digital Library. ARTstor also includes tools for using large numbers of images in lectures and presentations.
The website of the Creative Commons project searches Google, Flickr, and other collections for media with a Creative Commons license. The CC license allows anyone to use a work without permission, under certain conditions set by the creator. Attribution is usually required, and some works may not modified or used for commercial purposes.
PDP has 10,000 photos to use without condition. Note that the images at the top are free but that there are also 'sponsored' images starting at $1 for web size. These images, from fotolia.com and dreamstime.com, do cost. Just keep an eye out for which section of the site you're in.
stock.xchng is a free stock photo site owned by Getty Images. It has 300,000+ photos, and advertises paid stock photos from iStockPhoto below free photos.
Use photos from freefoto.com for no cost but with attribution (provide a link to freefoto.com).
Office.com offers free clip art and photos from Microsoft. They are not limited to use in Microsoft Office.
Sign out a camera from Classroom Services or the Student Tech Center and take your own photos. If people are in the images get their permission, crop to eliminate faces, or take crowd scenes with individual faces too small for recognition.
Also be careful if your photo includes the art work on campus. Some sculptures on campus can be included on university websites as long as you provide appropriate copyright and credit lines (which you can get from the Sculpture Collection web site). These imageable sculptures include these works (the 72 dpi applies to the web, other resolutions are for print usage):
Resolution to use (dpi) |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Artist | 72 |
150 |
300 |
Notes |
| Fred Bassetti | x |
x |
x |
|
| Richard Beyer | x |
x |
x |
|
| James FitzGerald | x |
x |
x |
Courtesy of Estate of FitzGerald |
| Lloyd Hamrol | x |
x |
x |
please check with Western Gallery before using |
| John Keppelman | x |
x |
x |
|
| Robert Maki | x |
x |
x |
|
| Isamu Noguchi | x |
please check with Western Gallery before using credit line: ©The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum - |
||
| Norman Warsinske | x |
|||
Other sculpture photos may not be used. Also note that if your photo contains part of a sculpture you still need to include the copyright info, just say "Detail of ___".
When you do use digital images, be nice to your users and size them properly for the web. This Photoshop tutorial can help you size and save your images for the web.
Copyright ©
2013 Western Washington University : page updated
04.23.2012
