Terms, briefly

Use them

Every photograph here is free to download and use for any purpose, commercial included. No account, no attribution, no invoice.

You can

  • Use them in commercial work, including work you are paid for.
  • Edit, crop, recolour and combine them.
  • Use them in a product you sell, or on a client’s site.
  • Let a model fetch them mid-task and put them in what it builds.

You cannot

  • Republish the library itself — as a competing stock site, or as a bulk download. The images are free; the collection is the work.
  • Imply that a photographer endorses whatever you used their photograph for.
  • Use images of identifiable people in a way that is defamatory or suggests endorsement. That is a model-release question, not a copyright one, and it is yours to answer.

Where these came from

Four sources, and the difference matters for what you are allowed to do. Every image carries its own licence field in the API, so you can check rather than take our word for it.

NASA

Works of the US government, which is broader than CC0: no copyright exists in the first place and no attribution is required. Filtered to material produced by NASA centres — the library also carries partner content that is not necessarily public domain, and the center field is what separates them.

One real limit, and it is a trademark one rather than a copyright one: the NASA insignia may not be used in a way that suggests NASA endorses you or your product. The same caution about identifiable people applies here as it does to every CC0 image — CC0 says in its own text that it does not waive publicity or privacy rights.

Wikimedia Commons

Filtered to CC0 and public domain. Commons is mostly CC BY-SA — free, but it requires attribution, which is the one thing this page promises you will never have to do. Roughly two out of three results are discarded on that basis alone. The tags come from Commons’ own category tree, stripped of housekeeping like “Media needing categories”.

Openverse

The bulk of the library, drawn from Openverse. Filtered to CC0 and Public Domain Mark only — the two that genuinely mean “any use, no attribution”. Openverse’s default results include BY-NC-ND, which is neither commercial nor attribution-free; none of those are here. The licence is checked three times: in the request, on every record that comes back, and again when the catalogue is built. Each image carries its licence in the API response so you can verify rather than trust us.

Lorem Picsum

993 photographs served through Lorem Picsum, which draws on Unsplash. These are the ones tagged entirely by hand — seventeen contact sheets, one image at a time.

We did not take these pictures and we do not store them. What is ours is the catalogue: the tags, the categories, and the fact that searching for a forest returns a forest rather than a mountain with trees on it.

What we cannot promise

The licence is verified three times and we stand behind it. The pixels are a different matter: a handful of uploaders released a photograph under CC0 and still burned their own website across the corner of the file. The licence says you may use it; the watermark says otherwise.

One cluster of these — a lost-pet noticeboard whose posters carried real phone numbers — was found and removed outright. The rest is a long tail across 8,474 contributors, and no amount of reading metadata finds it, because a watermark is not recorded anywhere except in the image itself. If you hit one, tell us and it comes out the same day. We would rather say this than let you find out in a layout.

Questions: [email protected] · or read the API terms.