The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is a collection of over 22,000 freely available digital materials for health sciences education. The collection is now housed at the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Digital Library.
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM)
All images in the NCCIH Image Gallery are free for non-commercial scientific and educational use. For these purposes, the images are freely available and may be used without special permission. Acknowledgement is required.
American Society for Microbiology Image Gallery
Images in the American Society for Microbiology are covered under a Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. This license permits end users to use and reproduce, but not modify, images from the Image Gallery, Visual Media Brief collection, Laboratory Protocols, or Curriculum Archive in classroom instruction and other non-commercial uses. Commercial reuse is granted on an individual basis. To receive permission to reuse resources, please request a license agreement form and learn more about associated fees please email education@asmusa.org.
National Institute of Mental Health
The NIMH Image Library is a searchable database of photographs and illustrations that are available, copyright free, to the public at no cost. The Library contains images of general biomedical research and research tools, mental health specific research, and treatment related images. Most are available in low, medium, and high resolutions.
The Noun Project offers over 150,000 icons with Creative Commons licensing. You may be required to register order to access and use certain features. Signing up for a free membership allows you to use the icons if you credit the creator. There is also a $9.99/month member option that allows you to use the icons without crediting the creator.
The New York Public Library Digital Collections
The New York Public Library offers over 600,000 freely available digital images. This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more. Out-of-copyright materials in NYPL Digital Collections are now available as high-resolution downloads. No permission required, no hoops to jump through: just go forth and reuse!
The Getty Open Content Program
The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.
Creative Commons Search is an aggregated list of search engines that offer images, music, and video with Creative Commons licenses. You can filter results by licensing options that allow the images to be used for commercial purposes and images to be modified, adapted, or built upon.
Open-i is an open access biomedical image search engine from the National Library of Medicine. You can filter results according to their license types. Open-i currently offers more than 1.5 million images.
Pixabay hosts over 490,000 photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and videos with a Creative Commons CC0 license. This allows you to download, modify, distribute, and use them without including an attribution.
Free Images offers nearly 400,000 images with a variety of different licenses. If you find a picture you like, click on the link for license to see what uses the license allows.
Wellcome Images offers over 40,000 general and medical images with different licenses. After selecting a particular image, please check the copyright restrictions at the bottom of the page to see the different uses allowed.
Images from this database are in the public domain and are freely available to the general public for educational, research, and personal use unless otherwise noted.
Public Health Image Library from the CDC
The Public Health Image Library offers a wide variety of medical photos, illustrations, and videos. This collection from the CDC includes public domain resources which are available for free use and copyright protected resources that require obtaining permission from the author prior ro use.
National Institute of General Medical Sciences
NIGMS is a searchable collection of scientific photos, illustrations and videos. Permission is granted to use these products for educational, news media or research purposes. The source for each must be credited. The material in this collection may not be used to promote or endorse commercial products or services.
Images from the History of Medicine
This database offered by the National Library of Medicine hosts over 70,000 images. Many of these images may still be protected by copyright law, please make sure you have appropriate permission to use any of these images prior to using them.
The National Institute of Health offers a small collection, about 200 images, through their Flickr account. After selecting an image, you can check the copyright status of these images by clicking on the link underneath the upload date.
Unrestricted Stock provides high quality stock photography, video, and vectors for free. All of our stock is royalty free and available for unrestricted use.
Wikimedia Commons is a database that offers over 29,000,000 freely usable media files, including images, sound clips, and video clips. All files are public domain and freely-licensed educational media content.
Currently Pexels offers over 10,000 free stock photos. And every month at least 1,500 new high resolution photos are added. All photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by users or sourced from free image websites. All published pictures are high-quality and licensed under CC0. Only creative commons images from reliable photographers and sources like Unsplash, Gratisography, Little Visuals and many more are added to the photo database.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease
NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health, leads research to understand, treat, and prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases. Permission to use NIAID graphics is granted on a case-by-case basis. Some are public domain, some are created by NIAID contractors, some are copyrighted and some are used by NIAID with specific permission granted by the owner. Therefore, the logos, photos and illustrations found on the NIAID website should not be reused without permission.