Hi,
I don't know if such a thing exists, but perhaps we should have a list or page on the main site of free resources that might be useful for OpenLP users.
I have a few in mind. Please reply to this post and add more...
https://www.freebibleimages.org/
- This site has many images that are free to use for non-profit use. I don't believe these images are (all) public domain but those where the authors retain their ownership they have granted free use rights for ministry purposes.
- You can search by books of the Bible, themes and more.
OpenClipart - https://openclipart.org
- Mostly "clipart" images as opposed to photographic images, but some are very high quality and would be hard to distinguish.
Great things about this site
- Everything on this site is dedicated to the public domain or CC0, effectively the same.
- No strings attached and no credit is needed for use of images, unlike many "free" image sites.
- This site promotes the free re-use, remixing and adaptation of images on the site. Within the site there is a way to tag/credit which images you have remixed contributed images from, but this is by no means a requirement, more of a way to encourage such use.
- Anyone can contribute, and a bunch of people have contributed stuff that I have found useful for ministry related stuff in the past.
- While there is a mix of content, there is a NSFW tag that can help you avoid unhelpful content.
- The images are all in SVG (vector) and PNG (bitmap) format. SVG is both potentially high quality and objects in an image can be modified with a little know how using a terrific free editor like Inkscape or various others.
- The moderators/librarians of this site do take down images that are found to be not public domain, so you can be fairly confident that you can use these with a completely clear conscience.
- Images are tagged and librarians can add tags, so this can help find images for ministry use.
Not so great things about this site
- The images are very much a mix of content type and quality, so it can take time to find useful resources, and you may have to edit them a little to get what you need. There are some explicit/adult images but these are required to be labelled as NSFW and the search engine can filter these if you set it to.
- The search engine is not perfect, though it is not terrible.
- The site is a bit slow as it is only a small not for profit community.
Unsplash - https://unsplash.com
- This site has a lot of excellent photographic and non-photographic images
- Some stuff is completely free to use with no credit needed, but some stuff is not (You have to check for each image)
- The search engine allows you to search by license (Free vs Unsplash)
Pixabay - https://pixabay.com
Great:
- This site has many free and great images
- They have duplicated a lot of the openclipart.org images and sometimes their search engine works better, though this also happens a bit the other way round for stuff that is clearly public domain.
- The Pixabay license terms require some interpretation as to how you can use things under the "Pixabay Content License" - see https://pixabay.com/service/terms/
Not So Great:
- Not all of the images marked as "free" or "public domain" are truly public domain, so it is a bit of "buyer beware"
Some other image sites that I will add with little or no comment
https://www.clker.com/
Very similar to Pixabay in terms of needing to be careful about what is free and not. Also has copied most of openclipart and various other PD sites.
https://www.pexels.com/public-domain-images/
https://free-images.com/
https://www.loc.gov/free-to-use/
All free but can take a long time to find useful stuff
https://www.nasa.gov/images/
Similar to a lot of US govt stuff that is free but you need to search hard to find useful stuff.
You can find some useful articles like this one:
https://www.lifewire.com/web-resources-for-public-domain-images-3482714
I hope this is useful!
