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Greetings,

One of the issues I run across when making games is the time, money and effort it takes to get good pictures. This can be art, model photos, or other mood setters.

Therefore, here are a few sources of FREE photos to help you out. Sometimes, the photos will require some attribution, so make sure you read the sharing details on each site. However, I have found these sites have made my life much easier as I do not always have to build, draw, photograph, or commission everything myself.

Sites:

Wikimedia Commons
Pixabay
Dreamstime
Videezy
Unsplash

Wikimedia Commons is my go to, because chances are if you see it on Wikipedia, you will find it on Wiki Media Commons. This is a great source for maps, historical paintings, museum artifacts, ruins, and reenactors in costume. However, these also have the most restrictions on attribution as well.

The others have their own various levels of quirks to use.

If you know of some more good sources of photos, artwork, videos, etc. please feel free to add it here. This is an effort to make more games available to more people that do not look like a typed A4 document.

US Library of Congress Photo archives
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/

I've dug into these for portraits for use in military history books.
Its always worth double checking the rights advisory (and attributing them properly, but all the info is in the entry) but most are public domain.

THE HABS/HAER/HALS (Historic American Buildings Survey, Historic American Engineering Record and Historic American Landscapes Survey) are really great for accurate renditions of 18th/19th century buildings and farms if you're looking to create an authentic battlefield.

There's good stuff in there, but not nearly as much as there should be due to the joys of digitizing images.

Everyone probably knows about the free icons page https://game-icons.net/