0:00 With the rise of artificial intelligence tools like chat GPT, you might think that public domain images are a thing of the past, but I still use them regularly to make sales in both the digital download space and also for print on demand designs. Now, there are some great high-quality images that are completely free to use, even for commercial purposes. So, in this video, I'm going to cover 10 of my favorite public domain sites that I use in 2026. Let's jump in. The first one we'll jump into is the Library of Congress, specifically their free-to-use and reuse sets. So, I'll put a link to this in the video description below. It's completely free to use. You can see at the top there, there's the address. So, this is free-to-use and reuse set. So, down below, it looks like these are thumbnails for individual images, but they're not. There's actually entire
0:46 sections inside of this. So, for example, I'm going to click on this artists and photographers right here, and we can see there's different artists and photographer pictures inside of this section. So, for example, if I want to use this one here, this is Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin practicing with a camera. So, this is a public domain photo. I'm going to click on it, and we'll see here this will come up. It's a pretty nice-looking photo. Now, you can zoom in on it. So, there's the full-screen view. Click the escape button to get out of it, and then you can download right here on the lower left-hand side, and you can download different file sizes, different quality. As I scroll on down, you're also going to see down at the very bottom the rights advisory. And most of the time, vast majority of time, it will say no known restrictions on publication. That's why it's in this section of free-to-use and reuse. The second site
1:33 that I like using is pdimagearchive.org. This is the public domain image archive. So, you can search the collection by typing in a search term, or you can browse by categories. I like browsing by categories if I'm in the mood for it. I'm going to click on that, and we can see down below you can browse by the artist, the century, the style. I'm actually going to browse by the style, and we can see there's all sorts of different styles here. So, in this case, I'm going to go to painting and drawing. And that gets us back 1,616 results. And as I scroll on through, we can see all sorts of different things, paintings, illustrations, and so on. And we can see here it's sorted as random. You can change the sort if you want to have earliest or latest. You can also change at any point if you want to switch it up and go to artist, theme. Let's say I want to go to artist, for example. I can see there's all these
2:19 different artists that I can start looking through as well. There's a lots and lots to see on this website. Now, this is a central repository, the public domain image archive is a big website. It's not necessarily a museum the same way like the Met or the Library of Congress is. So, as you scroll on down on any individual image, you may see the source over on the right-hand side. Here, this is an 1890s painting, flowers and pictures. And so, I can click on the Getty right here, and it'll give me information about it, including visiting the website. So, if you really like something, you can actually go right through often to the source material, and you can see more of that. Number three on my list is Wikimedia Commons. You can see here on the main page, it's a collection of Look at that number, 139 million images that are freely usable.
3:07 Now, these are media files, so they're not all images, but you can click on images, videos, sounds. I'm going to click on images, and we can see there's massive categories here. So, you may just want to start off by searching for something. So, up here at the top, search Wikimedia Commons. I'm going to type in house, for example, and we can see these are different houses that have come up. So, I'm going to click on this cool one here, and we can see this is a hut, and it'll give you the license here. So, sometimes it's not necessarily public domain, it might be where you have to give attribution. So, make sure to check the license. Here, you're free to copy and redistribute the material. You can also remix the material, but you must give appropriate credit if you make any changes. Now, one thing you can do
3:52 to quickly filter out those is as you're searching, you'll notice there's different filters here, and I can click on the license filter, and I can say no restrictions. Now, it's going to give me back lots of different options. I'm going to click on this house right here, and we'll see that's a great-looking image, Creative Commons Zero, and that's what you want. That's public domain. When I click on that, you'll see it's universal, no copyright. And so, what this means is that you can use this for any reason you want, commercial, personal, doesn't matter. Number four is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. There's a series of posters that you may have seen floating around the internet, and these are like propaganda travel posters of different places in the solar system, moons, planets, and so on. And you can actually use these. You can modify them if you want, or you can download them. So, these are really easy
4:38 to use. As you scroll through the page, you can just click on one, and then you can click on the actual image, and it'll populate. It's quite large, and then you can just right-click, and you can save the image. Another way you can download is you can select the poster, so you can click on it, and then you can go to full image details down at the bottom. That'll open up a page that's got some description, and you can download the JPEG file or the TIFF file, depending on your needs. Number five is Google Patents. And Google Patents might not be super intuitive because you might not think of these as like a public domain images, but they actually are public domain images. So, here on Google Patents, you can type in a search term. So, for example, golf club, and then we can see all the different patents that come up for golf clubs, and they've got some little illustrations here along the side. So, for example, I'm going to click on this one right here, golf clubs
5:24 and golf club heads, and the actual patent will come up. Now, you can download the PDF, which you easy. When you download the PDF, it'll come up with the actual image, all of the different patent information. This is a 100-page patent, but there are images here that can be relatively high quality. You could run these through Inkscape, for example, if you're looking for a specific type of golf print or bicycle, canoe, whatever. Another thing you can do is on Etsy, if you find a patent print that you really like, typically it will have the patent number. So, here you can see in the corner, the top right corner, there's a patent number, and when I scroll in, when I hover over, you can see the number, 1723278. And when I type it into Google Patents, I'm going to see a few different results
6:10 that come back, but here's the US patent, canoe or boat construction. So again, you could download the PDF, or you can look through the different images right here. This is just the one image. I can scroll in and really check out the image in great detail, or I can download the PDF, and I can use that now, run it through Inkscape. It'll give you all the patent information. You can get some really nice high-quality scans here on Google Patents. Number six is the Public Domain Review. This page is similar to the PD Image Archive, which was number two in this list. You have different essays, collections you can explore. What I really like about this is there's a blog as well, and this shows you really cool articles. Another thing I like to do is look at the collections. So, I've clicked collections here at the top, and I can see there's different collections down below. So, here for example is a
6:56 collection of images about space, and I really love astronomy and space stuff. So, we can see here from the year 1900 through 1922, there's some really cool slides of space stuff. And as I scroll down past the text, we'll see a few photographs, but also individual slides of different areas of the world. So, some of this stuff could be really useful if you're making your own digital designs, or if you find inspiration here to make print on demand designs as well. Things like Saturn's rings, different planets. Sometimes people like old creepy photos of people. There's so much to see on this website. hours and hours looking through really cool old public domain archives on this site. Number seven is Comic Book Plus. This is one of my favorite sites in the whole world. If you've been on here before, I'll give you a couple tips and tricks for the
7:42 advanced stuff, but let's start off with the basics. When you get onto Comic Book Plus, there's categories right here. So, you can select a category. Let's say you want to go into horror, for example. I'll select horror, and then from here, you can scroll down, and you can see page one of three. There's three full pages of horror titles. And inside of each of these, you can click on any individual one. So, for example, I'm going to click on Eerie, 21 books available, and all 21 books now are down below, Eerie number one all the way down through Eerie 17. And this quality will really depend on the individual scans. I'm going to click here at random, Eerie number 11, and we can see this is the individual comic book scan. So, sometimes there'll be things like inks or people's names on there. And then you simply click on it, and you can scroll
8:28 through, and you can see the individual comic book. You can read them, you can enjoy them. These are completely free to use, and there's hundreds of thousands of different books on Comic Book Plus. Now, if you've seen this website before, one thing you may not have noticed is over on the right-hand side, the latest comics keep coming up. And this is really cool if you've read a lot of books, or if you're looking for something new. So, here for example, I'm going to click on The Raven 5, 24 pages, and we can see here this is from April 12th, 2026. This is a relatively new download, and this is a great-looking scan of an old comic book. Another advanced tip is right at the very top, you can just click on comic books. It's the second link down. And when you click on comic books, what will happen is
9:14 it'll give you the master list of all the comic books on this website. It's alphabetized, so it starts with the A's, and it'll go right down to the Z's. And for every single company, you'll have every title that they've got. What I like about this page is that you can search individually on here very quickly. Just do control F, and then you can type something in like, for example, Captain Marvel, and I can see now under Fawcett, Captain Marvel Adventures comes up, Captain Marvel and the Lieutenants of Safety, Captain Marvel Jr. So, you can quickly find on the page if you're looking for a very specific book. Captain Marvel Jr. is one of my favorites, some great-looking covers here of old-timey Golden Age comic books. Number eight is the New York Public Library Digital Collections. What I really like is on their website, you can search only for public domain if you
10:00 so choose. So here at the top, I'm going to type in map and I'm only going to search for public domain and then I'll click search. From here I get over 26,000 results for maps. Because this is the New York Library, you might see some New York based stuff here or some US based stuff, but there's all sorts of maps, different timelines, different states, different cities. Here we can see a map of Massachusetts for example. I'll click on that. Okay, and this map is really high quality. You can see here it's a map of Massachusetts and I can zoom in using the little plus button here and it'll become very clear. So this quite a high quality scan. You can download it right here on the lower left-hand side. There's a download button and then you can pick the resolution that you'd like to download it at and sometimes it's a very high resolution file. Another thing I like about this website is they have what I call a breadcrumb trail. You can see
10:47 here the individual subfolders right down to the state of Massachusetts. So if you wanted to see similar maps, you can click on states for example and then you can see down below lots of maps that come up of different states, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas and so on. Number nine is another Google product, it's Google Fonts. If you're making text-based designs, whether they're digital downloads or print on demand, this could be a really helpful website. So here we've got 1900 families of fonts and you can view them either in a thumbnail view or in a list view. These are all free to use. So for example, if I like this font right here, I can click on it and you can just simply click the get font button right here and you can use this in your projects. Number 10 is the
11:34 Biodiversity Heritage Library and it's actually a Flickr site, which is like a photo album and they've got a ton of photos on here, they're almost 320,000 photos. So it typically will default to the photo stream, so you can just kind of scroll through and really see all the different flowers, animals. There's so many great illustrations on here. I'm going to click this one right here and we can see this pops up. It's a great looking image and I can also scroll through and continue along my journey here looking at these incredible images. You can also download the images right here on the right-hand side. You can go back to the photo stream on the top left side. So you can also click on albums and you can see different albums here that the Biodiversity Library set up. Some of the albums are pretty small, 10, 12 photos, but you can get a really cool
12:19 feel for different types of things, butterflies, fish, different animals here. So for example, I'm going to click on this one of the scary looking snake and we can see there's lots of beautiful pictures here of snakes. Public domain images are lots of fun, you can spend hours looking through them. Here's another video where you can have some fun in the world of public domain images.
