Creative Commons is an organisation that provides people who want to share there works a way of doing so. When you place for example pictures on the internet it is as a general rule copyrighted by you, the owner. By adding a creative commons logo you indicated that people are welcome to use it under certain conditions as indicated by the kind of logo used as explained on this page.
Creative commons has it’s own search page where you can find public domain pictures using different search engines. Here is a video introduction on how to use the Creative Common search page from within Firefox using the search box on the navigation toolbar.
The creative common image page has a list of sites that have pictures in the public domain. For example http://pdphoto.org that has the following refreshing note with some of its pictures:
License: This image is public domain, because I took the picture and I’ve made it public domain. I don’t care at all what you use this picture for.
(Note that pdphoto.org return results from
Dreamstime as well and those are not free to use).
You can also go directly to for example Flickr to find Creative Common
pictures as explained on this page at Flickr.
In Flickrs “advanced search” you can fill out that you only want
results that are licenced Creative Commons. You’ll have to look at the
different restrictions of this creative commons, but when you don’t
change the picture it is free to use as long as you mention the name of
the photographer.
When searching you will find that it is a science in itself to quickly
find good results, but practice and experience will help. There is a
lot available anyway.
