There are a number of websites that you can visit for public domain, free to use images. The wonderful people at Pandia wrote a very useful page listing some of them, and I would suggest that you please visit it. I've listed them with my own comments, mainly as an aid for me.
The Burning Well. I ran a search for 'library' and got 6 images back, none of which were particularly useful. The collection is made up of images that have been donated by individual photographers, but there's no indication as to how large it is. However, when you do a search for 'flower' and only get 300 results, it's fairly indicative that it's not going to be huge. It's easy enough to download the images, so this may well be a resource worth trying if you're really getting stuck, just on the offchance.
Everystockphoto says of itself "We are a search engine for free photos. These come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo's license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos. Membership is free and allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos." They provide access to 12,432,842 free photos and my search for 'library' returned 46,000 photographs, from a variety of resources - many from Flickr. The licensing was clear - public domain, attribution and so on. The search interface was good, and searchers can limit by license (8 options), database source, tags, shapes, widths, height and so on.
Flickr. I've talked about Flickr a lot in the past, and am not going to rehash it again now. Suffice to say, visit the Pandia blog entry for a good overview of the available functionality.
Freefoto is made up of 132413 images with 182 sections organized into 3636 categories. 'Library' gave me a disappointing 33 results, which were all the outside of buildings. Search functionality was minimal and worked on a category/directory based approach, though a simple free text search box was available.
Free Images has 6,000 images available, but it's a UK based resource. No library based images, and results were displayed in a directory format, which turned everything into a two click affair, which didn't interest me. They have 78 categories which is probably the best way to search their collection. Terms of use seemed fair - attribution and don't make money.
Free Range stock photographs was ok. My standard search gave me 20 results, which included, books, buildings, catalogue boxes and so on. Downloading requires free membership.
Karens Whimsy was an interesting find. The site says of itself "On the following pages you will find hundreds of beautiful images gleaned from my collection of old books, magazines, and postcards. They are all from material printed prior to 1923 and are in the public domain." It certainly is a whimsical collection, and one that it would be easy to spend a lot of time hunting through. There's a basic category arrangement, and my feeling is that it's a collection that would suit crafters and hobbists, rather than people who needed images for reports and presentations. No library images, but 6 clipart images of books.
Public Domain Photos. Five thousand images to do what you like with. 1 library image, but looking through the misc. section did show some really nice images that would work well in any professional report. Worth taking a stab at in the hope you'll get lucky.
Wikimedia Commons is another of my must go to sites. I source a lot of images from there - its simple to use, you get good results and a clear indication of what the copyright situation is for any image. There are almost 11.5 million images available, and while it didn't tell me how many 'library' images I retrieved, there were some really good ones in the mix.
If you need more image search engines - covering all images, not just PD ones, I've got a collection of them on my website.
Hi Phil
Just wanted to say thanks for this article. I was only thinking today I would like to know more about alternatives to a Flickr image search. You are, as ever, the Search Tsar.
Posted by: Val | October 21, 2011 at 02:39 PM
I often use www.sxc.hu which has been aquired by Stockphoto. It remains free, but the search on the site brings back results from Stockphoto; however, a drop-down menu Image Categories allows browsing the collection which is vast and the quality of material is very impressive.
Posted by: Ihar Ivanou | November 18, 2011 at 02:00 AM