Ever so often when designing a worksheet for your homeschool students you may feel the need to pretty things up by adding an appropriate picture. Most of us simply head over to a search engine and print out the first image we like. Did you realize that this is not legal? Not even if you are not planning on sharing the worksheet with anyone else. All images can not be simply taken off the internet and used.

You can get into serious trouble if you do so, as you may be in violation of someone’s copyright. You need to find your images at specific websites which allow you to use and modify them. Fortunately a number of people use the Creative Commons license to share their images with everyone. Here are some websites that you can legally download and use images off.

Pixabay

The website has a number of images available on a variety of topics. Simply enter what type of image you are looking for in the search box on the home page and you will get a lot of results. You can select the ones you like and click on the image to be taken to the page where you may download it from. Almost all images on the website are available for commercial use with modification as long as you credit the photographer or image creator.

Flickr

This site has a mixed bag of images, so you need to be careful. Please ensure that you read the creative common license used for each image. Most images have the license mentioned clearly on the download page. Should you have a doubt about how you can use the image, contact the user who has uploaded the image and clarify them.

Wikimedia Commons

Not only do you have images available on this website, you can get other media snippets as well. Videos, audios and more can be found here, free to reuse as required. Some images may require mentioning the uploader, but most do not. This also has images from a wide variety of topics. It’s quite a popular website for downloading images.