In yesterday's article, I spoke briefly about possible motivations of creators who release their work under permissive licenses. In today's article, I'd like to show you where you can find royalty-free media, which you can use freely in your posts and video's.
We're probably all familiar with Pixabay here on Steemit, but limiting yourself only to that one website is probably causing you to miss out. During my search, I've found many websites that host even more images than Pixabay. I hope some of them might be useful to you!
List of Websites for finding content under Public Domain or Creative Commons
Internet Archive
Internet Archive really deserves its own article, purely because it's the largest online resource for public domain material and I can't possibly fit everything in here. In total, they store around 10 petabytes of data, much of which is material that's been released into the Public Domain.
A lot of their materials are formerly copyrighted works that have now been released into the public domain. It would be impossible to list everything they have, so check out their website.
Bandcamp
Not everything on Bandcamp is freely available for commercial use, but when you check out the 'royalty-free' tag, you can find a lot of music released under permissive licenses. Great to keep in mind if you need a background track for a video-project.
Flickr
Flickr has a whole section dedicated to images released under Creative Commons licenses. They have millions of royalty free photographs that you can use for your articles. Do make sure you only use pictures that are available for commercial reuse.
Incompetech
Incompetech is a great website for finding royalty-free music, created by composer Kevin MacLeod. There's a pretty big chance that you've already heard some of his music, it has been used in over 2800 movies listed on IMDB.
You can use all of his music for free in your own projects, even commercially, as long as you give proper attribution. Kevin also has another website where you can buy royalty-free music for a 1-time fee, Freepd.com.
Pexels
Very similar to Pixabay, but it does have quite a bit of original material listed. I've been able to find many technology related images, as well as some stunning photographs. They're also hosting regular contests where you can win prizes by uploading your own images.
Pixabay
Pixabay hosts some of the most high-quality royalty-free images, everybody here on Steemit uses it. Their quality guidelines are very high, so you'll only find the best images here. It's pretty amazing that they can offer so many public domain images for free.
I personally really like their filtering system. It usually doesn't take me more than a couple of minutes to find the image I'm looking for. They even have some of the most abstract concepts covered, sometimes I'm pretty amazed to find an image for really weird ideas.
Pixnio
Great alternative resource for royalty-free images. Not as big of a selection as Pixabay or Pexels, but they do have some stunning photographs. Also seems like there rules for adding your own images aren't as strict.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is part of the same organization that runs Wikipedia and offers a large collection of over 64 million media files. You can find whole collections of images, audio and video, all of which are free to use and share.
A very nice feature of Wikimedia is that they categorize their content in terms of quality. They have some pretty extensive search options, so you won't have any trouble filtering through all of their files.
Additional Notes
I really hope that I've listed some websites here that could be useful for new creators. Always remember to properly list your sources if you use public domain material. Consider donating to the author if you can afford it, though it's certainly not a requirement.
There are many more websites that offer public domain resources for free, but I couldn't possibly list all of them in just one article. If you guys find this sort of post interesting, I'll definitely make a part 2 soon!