Phil Bradley [no relation] alerted me to a site called LibreStock which does a meta search of image sites and only returns those images that have a Creative Commons “zero” licence. A zero licence, as Phil points out with a quote from LibreStock site itself means “you can use these pictures freely for any legal purpose. This means that they are free to use, even commercially, you can modify, copy and distribute, and you don’t need to attribute.”
That’s useful to know. I often need to grab a quick image to illustrate a throwaway blog post, Facebook update or tweet, but don’t always have a camera to hand nor the object I’d photograph with which to illustrate the update.
I gave it a quick try first search for apples and getting loads of computer and phone shots. A search for bananas was more on point
Another search for “Ford Mustang” brought up just 5 shots, a search for “guitars” brought up some nice photos although some of them were of saxophones. Ten snaps for a search on robots one of which was of the Mars Rover and another of R2D2. A search for “garbage” and then “rubbish” brought up some odd results, a perfectly good skateboard and some leaves for instance, although other pictures included a pile of broken phones, a plastic bag caught on a tree and some wheely bins.
It looks like a useful and potentially inspiring source and the problematic results it returns may be an artefact of incorrect tagging of the photos by the original sites.