LibGuides: Images for teaching: Home

Welcome to our guide to finding images for teaching

"One picture is worth ten thousand words" (1)

This guide has been created by the Faculty Librarians at the University of Strathclyde to help staff and students locate pictures and images which can be used in teaching and learning settings. This list is not exhaustive and we welcome suggestions for inclusion. Please email links to help@strath.ac.uk. For guidance about using images in a research publication or a commercial setting, see our box below.

Before using images in teaching and learning you must check the terms and conditions of the relevant site and consult the website's licence. You should be aware that some sites below may contain images using different licences. It is your responsibility to check the licence for the image(s) you wish to use.

Images should be attributed, see our guidance below.

1. Frederick R. Barnard (1927). Printers Ink. March 10th. Cited in A. Partington (Ed.) (1992) The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (4th ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. P. 53.

Image sources designed for educational use

British Cartoon Archive
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Access to over 200 years of cartoon history from the UK. The FAQs provide guidance about appropriate use of the contents of the British Cartoon Archive: https://www.cartoons.ac.uk/faq.html
Open access/publicly accessible content. No login required.

Europeana
Access to over 50 million cultural resources from museums and galleries across Europe. See terms and conditions below.
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https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/rights.html
National Library of Scotland's Digital Collections
Access to a wide variety of digitised primary sources relating to Scotland including: Post Office directories, military lists, early Scottish books, Gaelic resources and much more.

SCRAN (Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network)
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Scran is an online learning service from the charity Historic Environment Scotland. It contains over 490,000 images and media from museums, galleries, and archives. It provides access to resources relating to Scotland's culture and heritage.
Strathclyde users must sign in to access many library eResources. Please follow any on-screen instructions and enter University email address and password with multifactor authentication where prompted.

VADS - Visual Arts Data Service
Access to over 140,000 images which are freely available for use in teaching, learning and research in the UK. Access the terms of use below.
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https://www.vads.ac.uk/common_access_agreement.html
Wellcome Library's digital collections
Access to digitised pamphlets, posters, books and sound records particularly useful for public health and history of medicine related topics.
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http://wellcomelibrary.org/what-we-do/digitisation/

General image sources

Everystockphoto
A search engine for free photos. Always check the licence information.
Flickr
Flickr offers a Creative Commons search. Read more about Creative Commons on the left hand side of the screen.
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To run a Creative Commons search, simply search Flickr, then use the Any License menu and select the licence by which you wish to refine your results.
Morguefile
Access to free photos. Licence information below.
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https://morguefile.com/license
Pexels
Approximately 40,000 photos licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). Read more below.
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https://www.pexels.com/photo-license/
Pixabay
Access to over 1.2 million images. Read more in the FAQs linked below.
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Read more here: https://pixabay.com/en/service/faq/
Unsplash
Over 300,000 photos. Read more below.
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https://unsplash.com/license
Wikimedia Commons
Access to over 43 million images. Read more about using these images below.
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia

Citing images

It is necessary to attribute materials which you use in your academic work which are not your own ideas. Images, tables, graphs, charts, illustrations and audio-visual material must be fully referenced.

Guidance about citing images is often available in referencing handbooks, e.g. Chicago Manual of Style and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA style).

Always check departmental or school guidance about citing materials. If there is no guidance available, the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) have produced general guidance about citing audio-visual materials which may be helpful.

Using images for commercial use or in research?

If you wish to use an image in a research publication, including a thesis which will be made available in electronic format, you must ensure that the image's licence permits this type of use or that you have the correct permission from the copyright holder. Should you require assistance with this please contact the Copyright & Licensing Compliance Team, contact details below.

If you wish to use images for a commercial purpose, you must ensure that they can be used in this way. The Copyright & Licensing Compliance Team can advise about this.

What is Creative Commons?

More information about the different Creative Commons Licences can be found here:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Copyright

Information and guidance about copyright can be found on the Copyright & Licensing Compliance webpages.

Using audio visual resources for teaching

Library staff have created a guide to using audio visual resources for teaching.

Further help

For further help with finding images for use in teaching please contact:

The University's Copyright & Licensing Compliance Team or your Faculty Librarian