Creative Commons Officially Launches a Search Engine That Indexes 300+ Million Public Domain Images

Heads up: Cre­ative Com­mons has offi­cial­ly launched CC Search, a search engine that index­es over 300 mil­lion images from 19 image col­lec­tions, “includ­ing cul­tur­al works from muse­ums (the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, Cleve­land Muse­um of Art), graph­ic designs and art works (Behance, DeviantArt), pho­tos from Flickr, and an ini­tial set of CC0 3D designs from Thin­gi­verse.” All of the indexed images are in the pub­lic domain and released under Cre­ative Com­mons licenses–meaning the images are gen­er­al­ly free to use in a non-com­mer­cial set­ting.

Head here to start search­ing.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pub­lic Domain Day Is Final­ly Here!: Copy­right­ed Works Have Entered the Pub­lic Domain Today for the First Time in 21 Years

An Avalanche of Nov­els, Films and Oth­er Works of Art Will Soon Enter the Pub­lic Domain: Vir­ginia Woolf, Char­lie Chap­lin, William Car­los Williams, Buster Keaton & More

The Library of Con­gress Launch­es the Nation­al Screen­ing Room, Putting Online Hun­dreds of His­toric Films

List of Great Pub­lic Domain Films