For promotional material, the UCAR Comms office states:
NCAR and UCAR’s visual identity relies heavily on photography. The shift from white backgrounds to image backgrounds is one of the major pillars of our rebranding effort. Stunning visuals that complement our science outreach materials help attract a wide variety of audiences, which is increasingly important in the crowded world of digital communication.
It is of utmost importance to ensure that the images used in DART materials are not copyrighted. Ignoring copyright restrictions risks a lawsuit for copyright infringement.
It is possible to pay to use copyrighted images from stock photography websites, but DAReS hasn't received permission to pay for stock photographs.
The easiest-to-navigate source of non-copyrighted images are the NOAA, NASA, US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management & National Park service photo streams on Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/noaaphotolib/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons/
https://www.flickr.com/people/usforestservice/
https://www.flickr.com/people/mypubliclands/
https://www.flickr.com/people/nationalparkservice/
NASA photos are typically in the public domain, while photos from other agencies are typically governed by the "Attribution 2.0 Generic" license which requires giving appropriate credit to the agency that produced them. Check the license for each photo.
Beneath each photo is an explanation of the license. Photos denoted with:
- Public domain
- No known copyright restrictions
can be used freely. Photos denoted with:
- Some rights reserved
can typically be used with attribution. The license disclaimer is typically a hyperlink that explains the restrictions. Photos denoted with:
- All rights reserved
are copyrighted and typically cannot be used. For example, certain photos are provided by private citizens as a courtesy to a government agency. This landscape is copyrighted by a private citizen, Natalie Bell, even though it is included the US Forest Service's photo gallery.
If you spend a few minutes browsing, you can see that there are absolutely stunning images that aren't copyrighted in these galleries.
"Theodore Roosevelt National Park" is a public domain image from the National Park Service:
"Young Monk Seal" is an Attribution 2.0 license image which can be used freely by crediting NOAA:
Photo credit: NOAA
"Jupiter's Great Red Spot as Viewed by Voyager 1" is a public domain image from NASA:
The second-most easy-to-use database of royalty-free images is Wikimedia Commons. It has over 72 million images and many of them are in the public domain and can be used for any purpose.
Wikimedia commons has two major drawbacks:
- Most of the images aren't very appealing
- Many of the images lack descriptive metadata, so querying the database can sometimes involve using unusual strategies
One viable but tedious strategy is to identify sources of visually appealing images and sift through the sources' catalogs. For example, both of these images are just titled, "View of Earth taken during ISS Expedition 45":
Searching for "aurora" or "city at night" wouldn't return either image in the query results. Terms that I have found to be useful are:
- "ISS 44" and "ISS 45" which return results for the International Space Station Expeditions 44 and 45, respectively
- "USGS" which returns results created by the United States Geological Survey
- "NPS" which returns results created by the National Park Service
- "Bernard Spragg. NZ" who is a New Zealand based photographer who releases some of his images into the public domain
- "Les Anderson" who was an art photographer whose son released his father's images into the public domain
- "www.Pixel.la Free Stock Photos" which is a website that has released a subset of its content into the public domain
It's also useful to restrict the results to returning images with no restrictions, meaning they are in the public domain and can be used freely:
