There are number of ways that you can obtain public domain photographs and illustrations on the internet – unfortunately, none of them are blindingly obvious or easy to find for the novice.

One excellent source is in fact one of the largest and most popular sites on the web….Wikipedia. Specifically, the section of Wiki you want to be looking in is called Wikimedia Commons. What exactly is this? In their own words, “Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to all”

 

As an experiment I went over to Commons and typed in ‘New York City’ (my favorite city!).  Now this brings up a lot of image results from all over Wiki. You need to be careful as not all of these are public domain – there are all kinds of different licenses. The most likely are the old, historic photos, these are what we are interested in. To be sure, all you need to once you have clicked on an image you like is scroll down and look for something like this:

 

And there you go! Look at some of the stunning NYC photos I found:

 

Click here for full size

 

Click here for full size

 

Another tip for finding PD content on Wiki is this. Go to Google and type in the name of what you are looking for, followed by this:

 ”hereby release it into the public domain” wikipedia

 The beauty of these is you can use them for whatever purpose you like……and that includes making money from them. Im going to share some ideas about how, exactly you can do this in future posts