You may have already found yourself looking for images for a project and wondered if you had the right to freely use the ones you found. on google image search. The short answer is “yes and no”… Indeed, it depends on the license of use of each image, because Google displays both royalty-free and licensed images…
The good news is that Google will allow you to easily find royalty-free images and help you obtain the rights to paid images thanks to its image search tool.
Search for free or royalty-free images with Google
- Make a google search as you usually do and click on the section Images
- Click on Tools, on the far right, under the search bar
- Clicking on Usage rights, you will be able to filter the search according to the license: Creative Commons or Commercial.
An interesting addition is that Google now surfaces information about how you can license the rights to an image directly in the description.
If you do not check any of the “Usage Rights” options, Google will simply display all images that match your search criteria. Images that are missing license data will be marked with a warning, stating “images may be subject to copyright.”
It's worth noting that Google only surfaces image licensing data if a creator or publisher has already provided that information. Your best bet to avoid unknowingly using an image is to copyrighted image is therefore to filter photos not containing this information.
Otherwise, you can go take a look at free image banks like Pixabay, which I use a lot, or Visual Hunt.
Article updated on January 5, 2025 by Byothe
