Creative Commons
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that promotes the global sharing of images, music, and other creative tools for free. Artists and musicians submit their work to Creative Commons for others鈥� use on media-related projects.
The following Creative Commons websites have free music, pictures, and videos available for school and personal projects. Have creative commons media links you would like to share with your fellow students? You can submit them to uwbit@uw.edu.
Note: when you use Creative Commons material from the web please remember to give the original authors credit by putting their names in your citation page. This isn鈥檛 just a friendly thing to do – it is often a requirement!
Images
This is probably the easiest website to use for photos and it doesn鈥檛 require account creation to download images. Still, make sure the images have a CC license before you use them.
This site is great to use for clip art images.
Provides direct downloads of Flickr CC content.
This site is designed for educational purposes and features a range of safe images ready for use in a variety of projects.
Music
Free recordings of live concerts available for non-commercial use. Allows you to search or browse by artist, most recent, etc.
Select the one that sounds appropriate for the mood or tone you want to create in your media project, e.g. blues, electronic, hip-hop, etc. Note: Click on the arrows to download.
Note: The blue icon on the right lets you know that it鈥檚 free and enables downloading when you click on it.
This site has a large database of free music.
Download, sample, or remix any of the pieces on the site.
When searching for music, make sure to modify search under 鈥淟icense to listen to鈥� and select 鈥淭o use commercially.鈥�
Video
Other sites
Use these websites as resources for your media projects. However, please keep in mind that when you are searching for music or images on these sites, not all tracks and photographs are available royalty-free.
. These images are freely available for use, and can be used in projects both inside and outside of the classroom.
. This can be particularly helpful if you are making a digital video or short film. For example, if you are making a horror film, you can simply search 鈥渉orror鈥� in the keyword engine and you will find rather dark, suspenseful pieces recorded on piano.
provides free music tracks and video for student and faculty. Note: Music and video on this website may or may not be creative commons so make sure to look at the Terms of Use for each track