Openly-Licensed Images and Videos
The following provides hints on finding openly-licensed images and important information on utilizing videos in OER. One key point to remember is the license of the original media. To be used in OER, the media must be:
Media needs to CC-BY or CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-SA or CC0/Public Domain
Youi can find more information at the or about
Finding Openly-Licensed Images
- Sources for Openly-Licensed Images
You can also find openly licensed images from the following sources.
- ASCCC OERI has a ; most of the pictures are biology diagrams:
- (use CC License filter)
- has figures from research articles
- provides free images of women from around the world
- offers free and openly-licensed high-resolution photos of black and brown people
- provides drawings that you can mix and match.
- provides free and openly licensed photos of people of color
- provides icons of women
- provides free and openly-licsenced photos of women and non-binary people of color working in the Tech field
- Repositories of Image Sites
Like this page, there are repositories of places to look for openly-licensed images:
- List of (click on Openly-Licensed Image Repositories)
- has a (images and videos under Finding OER: Repositories and Search Tools (pg. 39 of PDF)
- LibreTexts has a short list of open-source image repositories in
- List of
- The page provides DEI-driven image databases; many of the options linked above were from this toolkit
- List of
Videos
- What To Know
Like images, use your favorite search engine and click on Videos, then find the filter 鈥淎ll Licenses鈥� and click on 鈥淎ll Creative Commons鈥�. This isn鈥檛 foolproof, though; sometimes the search still provides videos that are licensed or copyrighted.
When searching, reading the 鈥淎bout鈥� page or the EULA (end user licensing agreements) to ensure that the owner of the site has the licensing rights to whatever you are sharing.
Another thing to note is that the EULA鈥檚 of most of these services make it clear that they are free for streaming but not for public display (i.e. they cannot be shown in a classroom). Some educators are under the false belief that they can do anything with source materials as long as it is for 鈥渆ducational鈥� purposes, but that is not true.
Avoid YouTube videos with auto-generated captions with this simple trick! After entering a search on YouTube, use the "Filter" option to limit results to those with Subtitles/CC. Note the other filters available, such as Duration and Creative Commons:
- There is no copyright violation if you embed YouTube videos, , you are not copying the video, the embed code itself is just a link.
- "Taking a look at the actual code makes one thing obvious: no copy of the YouTube video is being stored on your server (only the HTML code for the embed). The video stays on, and is streamed from, YouTube's servers."
- Content owners on YouTube who do not want their content embedded have settings to prevent that, it removes the functionality.
- Finding Openly-License Videos
You can also find openly licensed videos from the following sources.
- List of (click on Video Repositories)
- has a (images and videos under Finding OER: Repositories and Search Tools (pg. 39 of PDF)
- Netflix has a. Netflix has put some of its films and series out for free on its YouTube channel, with captions!
Some of these were found under Multimedia in Dr. Larry Green鈥檚 .