5 Unexpected Sites to Get Royalty

Sep 30, 2023

These sites give copyright-free material that not many others know about, which would get you noticed more.

The internet has no shortage of websites hosting royalty-free and copyright-free material, especially for images, audio, or video. But everyone ends up using stuff from the same popular sites, such as Unsplash or Icons8, and the best images start repeating, so your content doesn't stand out from the crowd.

But there are a few places to get copyright-free material that not many others know about, which would get you noticed more. From government-affiliated institutions like the Smithsonian and NASA to people who review and curate material available in the public domain, these are some unexpected sites to get free and royalty-free images, audio, and video.

Apart from the famous Smithsonian National Museum in Washington DC, the Smithsonian Institution operates 20 other museums, nine research centers, a zoo, and several libraries. Its vast archives of knowledge are now available to download, share, and reuse under the Smithsonian Open Access program.

The collection includes almost five million images and over 2000 3D models, which you can filter by museum or unit, topic, date, place, group, or resource type. The resource type is where you will find sub-categories such as paintings, ornaments, holotypes, graphic arts, living botanical specimens, etc. And, of course, there's a robust search engine. You might also want to browse through the Open Access Remixes section to see what others have done with this rich collection of materials.

All data is available under the Creative Commons Zero license, making it free of copyright restrictions and available for commercial as well as non-commercial use. Please note that this applies only to materials hosted in the Smithsonian Open Access program and not other items on the website.

For over 100 years, the British Broadcasting Company, or BBC, has been the global gold standard of radio and audio programming. Naturally, it has amassed a massive collection of sounds and sound effects. It might be surprising to know that the BBC allows you access to them through the BBC Sound Effects portal.

BBC Sound Effects includes categories such as nature, transport, machines, daily life, military, museums, animals, clocks, sport, footsteps, aircraft, electronics, and crowds. And of course, there's a powerful search engine to find what you want. You can preview the sound effects directly on the page before downloading it and further sort them by duration or origin of recording.

The website also includes a built-in sound mixer. You can add multiple sound effects in this and see how they would play overlaid on each other. You can also add effects to your favorites and refer to them later.

BBC Sound Effects can't be used for commercial projects and has a long page about the licensing details. But they also add, "As a general rule, as long as your usage remains non-commercial, you can use sound effects for free, crediting the BBC. If the usage becomes commercial - i.e. if you monetize it, sell it, or charge for access to it, or if it is advertising-funded or commercially sponsored, then that counts as commercial use, and you will need to license the recording."

Photos of galaxies from wide-array super telescopes. Iconic images like man walking on the moon. Audio recordings of historical phrases like "Houston, we have a problem." Videos from the Mars rover showing the terrain on our neighboring planet. It's all available for free download in high-quality formats, and to reuse and remix as you see fit.

The NASA Image and Video Library isn't great for browsing through the materials available, so you'll mostly need to use the search engine. In the results, you can further narrow them by year or type of content (image, audio, video). It's not the best system because if you don't know what to search for, you won't come across materials by simply browsing. But do yourself a favor and check the "Trending & Popular" section on the main page. It's truly one of the best NASA sites to explore Earth and space.

When it comes to non-commercial use, all NASA content (images, audio, video, and 3D models) is not subject to copyright and can be used freely. There can be restrictions for commercial usage, but they're much more lenient than most others, and you can read about them in the media usage guidelines.

The US Library of Congress (LOC) has kept records of a wide range of historical materials, especially photos, art, and illustrations. Not all of these are copyright-free, but once in a while, the LOC makes a collection of images it believes are either in the public domain, have no known copyright, or have been cleared by the copyright owner for public use. And you can now browse all of them in the Free To Use section.

It's not a huge collection compared to others on this list, but it's definitely unique. Each set of images is based on a theme, such as birthdays, main streets, the Statue of Liberty, 19th-century portrait photos, classic children's books, Independence Day, etc. As you might expect, this is perhaps one of the best collections of historical and antique pictures.

All material from the LOC's free to use section can be used for commercial or non-commercial purposes and doesn't require attribution to the original.

The Public Domain Review isn't affiliated with any government agency, nor does it have a long history. Started in 2011, this non-profit project has the simple goal of highlighting copyright-free and royalty-free pieces that are worth noticing. PDR says it wants to focus on "the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful."

The website is worth using as your go-to resource for materials because it's already done the job of curation. If you peruse other databases of copyright-free materials, you'll find an aggregation of both good and bad content that you have to sift through to find something worth using. But with PDR, you won't have that problem.

PDR categorizes its picks by categories like essays or collections of themes such as maps, architecture, technology, war, etc. You can also browse it by tags or use an alphabetized index of all materials on the site. Each piece on the site links to where it was originally hosted, along with its underlying work rights and downloadable links.

When it comes to materials in the public domain or under a Creative Commons Zero license, you often are not required to include a credit for the original maker or any sort of attribution. But it's polite and courteous to do it nonetheless, and where possible, you should also include a link to the place where you found the original work.

Mihir Patkar has been writing on technology and productivity for over 14 years at some of the top media publications across the world. He has an academic background in journalism.