Databases of the week
Week 49
Openverse: Royalty-free photos and audio fragments for your website or social media
What is Openverse?
Openverse is a search engine that searches more than 800 million photos, images and audio fragments in the public domain and with an open license on the internet. These are collected from multiple public repositories and can be reused with one click. They can be (re)used by everyone for e.g. websites, social media, presentations, theses and articles.
Openverse is the successor to CC Search, which was launched by Creative Commons in 2019, after the migration to WordPress in 2021.
Searching in Openverse
When searching in Openverse, you can combine different terms in the following ways:
- + means AND (dog+cat)
- / means OR (man/woman)
- - means NOT (boy -girl)
- at the end of a term means anything that starts with that term (Net* : Netflix, network, Netherlands)
- Exact combination: between quotation marks, e.g. “Martin Luther King”
For example, if you want to put a version of Martin Luther King's historic speech on your social media, search for “Martin Luther King” + “I have a dream”. This is the result.
Sources
Some of the largest and most important sources that Openverse searches are:
• Europeana (over 11,000,000)
• Flickr (over 500,000,000)
• iNaturalist (over 260,000,000)
• Various branches of the Smithsonian Institution (over 6,000,000)
• Wikimedia Commons (over 75,000,000)
Some other interesting sources are NASA (for space photography), Rijksmuseum, World Register of Marine Species, Animal Diversity Web, Jamendo (sound clips).