Are you a teacher or educator trying to find real-life pictures for your science lessons or displays? Perhaps you’ve been creating a classroom science resource, needed photos, and turned to Google Images, only to find they’re grainy or watermarked. Plus, you don’t want to spend out on images you might only use once from the big stock photo sites.
Don’t worry! There are plenty of great websites that offer images to download for free. You can use them in your classroom resources without compromising on quality. Here’s my pick of the best to get free images for teaching science.
Pixabay
Pixabay is home to nearly 2.5 million files, ready to download. They include music and video as well as stunning photographic images. Choose from a selection of file sizes so you can print a high-resolution photo, or use smaller files in digital resources. I have used this website for years and love it!
TeachersPayTeachers
Did you know that there are lots of sellers on TpT who offer high quality stock images in their stores for free? There’s also plenty of free science clipart that you can use. For personal classroom use, the terms are usually very flexible but it’s always best to check.
Smithsonian Open Access
This website is a game-changer for teaching science! Smithsonian Open Access allows you to browse and download millions of images from the museums’ amazing collection of objects and specimens. Many specimen photos provide a handy ruler, making the images suitable for identification activities where students need to see the size of something. I particularly like the fossil images.
Some of their collection has even been digitized in 3D so students can manipulate them on-screen to see different angles.
Unsplash
Unsplash is home to some seriously dreamy images. When you search, keep in mind that they display images from a partner site, iStock, at the top of the search result. These aren’t free, but scroll down and you’ll see the Unsplash results that you can download without charge
Pexels
Like Pixabay, Pexels gives you access to video clips as well as beautiful images. There are so many options – I searched for bee images and found over 1,500 photos and nearly 600 videos!
Canva for Education
Canva makes it so easy to make beautiful resources for your classroom. They have an amazing bank of photos and clipart that you can just drag and drop into whatever you are working on. They also have pre-made templates you can use for presentations, worksheets, and more. Plus you can edit images and remove backgrounds with the click of a button!
Best of all, they allow teachers to sign up for free via their ‘Canva for Education‘ service (for personal classroom use only). I have been using the paid version (Canva Pro) in my business for a few years and wouldn’t be without it.
Final thoughts
I’ve written this post with personal classroom use in mind. Commercial use of images is allowed in some cases but please check the terms and conditions of individual websites before including them in resources to sell.
I hope you’ve found this post about free images for teaching science useful. If you want to hear more from me, why not sign up to my mailing list? When you do, you’ll receive either a free sunflower life cycle or fossil formation resource to use with your students.
