Perform a standard search, click the ‘ Any license‘ dropdown on the top left and hit ‘ No known copyright restrictions‘. Works of unknown creator/s: Often archive photos, these are works where the creator’s identity (and by extension, copyright) can no longer be established.Īccessing these images isn’t hard.

Works with lapsed copyright: These are old works – books, magazines, posters and advertising materials – where copyright and often the creator/s themselves expired long ago.Currently, more than 150,000 photographers contribute images on Unsplash. The works fall into two broad categories. Unsplash is a hub of royalty-free images that was founded in 2013. Incredibly, The Internet Archive of Book Images alone has been digitizing lapsed copyright books for well over a decade now, and now has more than 5 million images on the site.

The majority of it is in the Public Domain and copyright free. Many of the world’s great libraries, government agencies, private companies, national & state archives, museums, and historical societies use Flickr as a catalog for their books, documents, illustrations, and photographs.

Royalty free images flickr