Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Royalty free pictures at the USDA

A relevant picture can dramatically improve a post. A big problem is finding images which I can legally use.

Last month in a class at work the instructor told us the United States Department of Agriculture has tons of royality free pictures. This page explains:

"All of our photographic images are USDA property and, consequently, are in the public domain."

A good place to start is their Image Search page. They have these categories:

Animals

Crops

Education

Field research

Fruits & veggies

Illustrations

Insects

Lab research

Plants

Here are a few fun ones:



Next time you need a good image you might check out the USDA's photos.


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Technorati tags: pictures, photos

5 comments:

Sebastian said...

I think that this is true for most government pictures. I know that Department of Defense pictures are in the public domain.
Actually, if you ever meet a military photographer and need to spin him up, you might ask about this. I met one photographer a few weeks back who has at least one image that is being sold by poster companies without giving him even credit for the photo. Totally legal.

Happy Campers said...

Very interesting! I didn't know that...

Unknown said...

Thank you for the great link!

Melanie said...

Yep, most photos at .gov addresses are free.

Here's the Library of Congress Flickr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/

And the US Gov't Image Search page:

http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Graphics.shtml

Henry Cate said...

Melanie, thanks for the links. There are a lot of interesting pictures there.