Finding photos and images for use for educational purposes is a daunting task given the current copyright regime. The Creative Commons offers some hope. Recently, the Wellcome Trust announced that it has released its collection of photos for non-commercial use (via the Creative Commons blog):

Teachers, students, academics and the public can now download and use images depicting 2,000 years of mankind and medicine for free, thanks this newly launched website from the Wellcome Trust.

Launched on 15 June 2007, 'Wellcome Images' is the world's leading source of images on the history of medicine, modern biomedical science and clinical medicine. All content has been made available under a Creative Commons Licence, which allows users to copy, distribute and display the image, provided the source is fully attributed and it is used for non-commercial purposes.

Wellcome Images is constantly updated with new clinical, and biomedical and historical images from the Wellcome Library, Europe's leading resource for the study of history of medicine which recently re-launched as part of the new and forthcoming Wellcome Collection.

This is terrific news for educators!

For more general purpose images which are Creative Commons licensed, you might try Flickr. It is a photo hosting site which allows users to CC-license their photos for others to use. You'll be surprised by the number of CC-licensed photos. Use their Advanced Search, and make sure the "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed photos" box is checked. You can use the photos as the respective license describes. Do inform the owner as a courtesy!

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