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Impact of academic publication depend on both the exciting research and how you present it. We list free image databases you can use to get high quality images!
Regardless of the stage of your academic career, you probably find yourself building at least a few PowerPoint presentations per month or disseminate your research in a creative way via social media, for example on LinkedIn. And there’s nothing worse than listening to someone reading from the slides right? I believe you sat in such a presentation yourself and managed to read the entire slide much faster than the presenter.
That’s why visual content is crucial not just in social media, but also in your articles, research presentations, business presentations and, basically, any kind of academic communication. Great photographs and videos can catch the attention of your readers or followers, which automatically encourage them to read your article or listen to your presentation. After all, a picture can tell more than 1000 words, right?
But high-quality photos and videos take a lot of time and talent to prepare. Unless visual content creation is your hobby, you probably don’t have time or skill to prepare these yourself. But worry not – we’ve got you covered.
When we prepare our materials we tend to take our own photos and videos. However, when the weather is really bad and the light is poor – quite common in the UK! – we tend to rely on image databases for our PowerPoint presentations. These, often free image resources allow you to download high quality and high resolution photos that can support your argument, regardless of whether your research focuses on climate change, global warming, psychology, or business management.
Today we’ve prepared a list of 32 image databases from which you can download high quality stock images for free to build effective presentations for your research. But let me discuss some important points that you need to know before using such free images.
Before you use any of the free image databases for research and presentations
The easiest image search you can perform is to use Boolean operators in Google with the keywords that represent the messages you want to present in your work. For example, you may want to search “climate change” AND “global warming” and then move to the image section of the Google search. Easy peasy, right?
But…I’m sure you know that not every photo you find via Google search is free to use in your presentation. Most of the images you can find in Google are protected by copyright! If you would like to use or reproduce a particular photo, usually you need to get written permission from the author. You will also need to acknowledge the author.
You can also use a photo that is marked as a public domain photo or use a Creative Commons image downloaded from image databases that need attribution. As a rule of thumb, as with references, you need to be citing image sources in most cases.
This is the important part. Before you download and use any of the photos, make sure to check the license, terms and conditions of the website where you download the image from.
Each image database or image website will have its own terms and conditions that will specify how you can use the image, where you can use it, do you need to include attribution, is the photo for commercial or non-commercial use only, and whether there is another license you need to pay for commercial use. You need to check this for all image resources you use in your work.
What is a Creative Commons License in image databases?
When you explore the image databases that we listed below, you will come across a Creative Commons license. So what does this mean to you? Simply speaking, Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that enables sharing and using creative media and goods through free legal tools.
There are different types of Creative Commons Licenses: from allowing you to use the photo without any attribution with any modification through to limited use for specified purposes without modifications. You can read more about these here.
Here is the excerpt with the explanations for the types of Creative Commons Licenses.
“Attribution CC BY: This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA: This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
Attribution-NoDerivs CC BY-ND: This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you.
Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC: This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.Attribution-<