The following are mainly free to use for educational purposes. They can be used by college staff or students and incorporated in to your work. Don’t forget to credit if you are using them. *As with all collections look at the website for terms of use.
Europeana Collections http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en This collection is home to the European Digital Library. It has over 53,000,000 images and videos, covering it covering Art, music and Fashion. They include some national libraries, universities, and other institutions. Go to “explore”, then “sources” to see participating institutions.
Flickr https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ You can search for images with a variety of rights, e.g., “no copying”, “non-commercial use only” or “full public domain”.
Free Images http://www.freeimages.co.uk/ You can use these images freely in any capacity as long as you credit the website by downloading their banner or provide a text-link to their website.
Image after www.imageafter.com Organised into subjects e.g. architecture, nature etc. with a mixture of download-able free stock images and stock images for a very small fee.
National Education network http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/index.php Primarily set up for use by teachers to help in their teaching, images are categorised into broad subjects. You can registered and upload your own images to share with the community (subject to website approval).
Visual Arts Data Service www.vads.ac.uk This has over 100,000 images available from over 60 digital collections; including the new West Yorkshire Textile Heritage Project.
Welcome Images https://wellcomeimages.org/ Primarily a Medical Picture Library, and yet it has added content to support other subjects such as history and culture.
These organisations often have their own search-able archives, some key ones are:
British Library https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/albums There are over 1,000,000 images on flickr commons
British Library (The Illustration Archive) http://illustrationarchive.cardiff.ac.uk/ A project run for Cardiff University to offer searchable illustration archive of over 60,000 books from 19th century in the British Library. All are in the public domain.
British Museum https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx Over 2,300,000 records all can be downloaded under a creative –commons non-commercial license. Images should be credited with © Trustees of the British Museum.
Glasgow School of Art http://www.gsaarchives.net/collections/
Imperial War Museum http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections
National Portrait Gallery http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/advanced-search.php You can search by either the artist or the sitter.
Smithsonian Institute http://collections.si.edu/search/ Washington museum with over 10,000,000 search-able objects.
Tate Collections Online http://www.tate.org.uk/art
