Best Places to Find Copyright Free Clipart

More and more people these days are creating websites, posters, and greeting cards on their computer. So what do websites, posters, and greeting cards have in common? They all make use of both text and images.

Now, most of us have reasonably strong English skills; hence, we are able to create our own sentences, paragraphs, and headings. The same can not be said in regards to artistic skills.

What does Copyright-Free mean?

There are a wide variety of websites on the Internet which provide both clip art and photorealistic graphics. Some places require you to pay for their images while others provide these images free of charge.

The problem is that free of charge doesn’t mean exactly what you think. You would assume that you could take a free image, manipulate it however you want, and then use it for whatever purpose you desire (whether commercial or non-commercial). However, most free images on the Internet come with an image license agreement. Such an agreement may require you to:

• Give attribution to the image creator
• Prevent you from manipulating the image
• Prevent you from using the image for commercial purposes.

A copy-right free image, one which is said to have been placed into the public domain, has no such restrictions. Such an image has had all of its copyrights removed; consequently you can manipulate it and use it for whatever purpose you may desire (without any form of attribution).

The Best Place to Find Copyright-Free Clipart

There are a number of websites that focus on providing copyright-free images (most of which is clipart). Here are what I would consider, to be the best.

1) The Open Clip Art Library

The Open Clip Art Library is a collection of nearly 41,000 clip art images which have been placed into the public domain. 41,000 images may seem like a lot, and it is; however, this number is not static. In fact, each month hundreds of clip art images are added to the repository.

In its infancy, the Open Clip Art Library was rather large and unwieldy. You had to download the whole repository and make use of an unordered html table of contents to try to find what you were looking for. These days, however, thanks to the tireless work of its members, most of the images have been tagged and are fully searchable. Do you need a picture of a hammer? Simply enter the term “hammer” into the search box and pick from amongst numerous hammers.

It is useful to note that the Open Clip Art Library typically allows you to download images in SVG and PNG formats

2) Clker

Clker is another large repository of public domain clip art images; additionally, it houses a number of public domain stock images. One of the major strengths of Clker is that images are excellently tagged and categorized. Consequently, it is very easy to find exactly what you are looking for in either PNG or SVG format.

Clker also provides a tool which allows you to vectorize your own images. Basically, this means that you can take a normal photograph and convert it into a clipart-like image. The results are not always optimal; however, it is a nice feature to have nonetheless.

3) WPClipart

Overall, I believe that the Open Clip Art Library and Clker are the best out there because of their size and ease of use. Despite saying this,WPClipart is another nice public domain clip art site. It is reasonably sized and allows you to find images through a search function or a multi-layered category layout.

The one benefit of WPClipart over the other two options is that it provides most images in JPEG format (in addition to PNG format).

Summary

There you go, if you ever need clip art images and aren’t artistically inclined, head over to one of these three sites. Not only will you be able to find what you want, but you won’t have to worry about any form of restrictions either.

(By) Keith hosts Computer Repair Vancouver, a blog dedicated to providing technical advice to those in the Lower Mainland, BC