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#3 — U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Photos of scenery, wildlife, people in the outdoors, and miscellany. Enter search terms on the left. Try searching by "Virginia" or "eagle", then setting it to show 100 results per page (on the left).

Image Quality: Average – Excellent!
Quantity: Thousands

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#4 — Department of Defense

Photos of soldiers, vehicles, and operations in Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Finding just the right photo is time-consuming, because the search tends to return thousands of results. You can also browse by category by clicking "search images by topic". New photos are added regularly. Try searching for "bomber" or "sunset".


Image Quality: Good – Excellent!
Quantity: Thousands

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#5 — Yellowstone National Park

Photos of everything in the park including scenery, plants, animals, wildfires, geo-thermal activity, park visitors, etc.
The library is organized in helpful categories, but there is no search feature. Some photos are beautiful, but many are somewhat unimpressive. Ex:

Image Quality: Average – Excellent!
Quantity: Thousands

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#6 — Antarctic Photo Library

Photos of amazing Antarctic scenery, transport vehicles, and scientists.

Image Quality: Great – Excellent
Quantity: Several hundred

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#7 — Public Health Image Library

Photos of bacteria, disease-carrying animals, patients, public health research, and other topics. The advanced search is more helpful than the basic search. Some photos are decades old.

Image Quality: Poor – Excellent
Quantity: Thousands

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#8 — FEMA

Photos of disasters, recovery, community relations, congressional relations, and much more. There are many search options, but the search engine is picky about keywords. If you search for “fire” you won’t get a superset of the results from “wildfire” or “wild fire”. Try different search strings. No browse available.

Image Quality: Average – Good
Quantity: 16,000

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#9 — Grand Canyon National Park

Gorgeous photos of the park and a few of wildlife. Easy to browse. The only drawback is that the collection is so small.

Image Quality: Good – Excellent
Quantity: 125

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#10 — NASA Image Exchange

Wide variety of NASA photos including: Earth, shuttles, jets, and experiments. To get high-resolution, click "+ More Details” after performing a search. Unfortunately, high-resolution images are not available for many of the photos. Try searching for "f-15".

Image Quality: Poor – Good
Quantity: Several thousand

Find the Best Copyright-Free Photos on BestPhoto.US

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First Runner-Up — U.S. Geological Survey – National Parks

Historical and some modern photos of all U.S. National Parks. Most of the photos are black and white, and there is no way to filter them out, but some of the parks have good color, high-resolution images.

Image Quality: Average – Good
Quantity: Many thousand

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Second Runner-Up — Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative

If you need amphibians, this is the place. Unfortunately, no large, high-resolution images are available.

Image Quality: Average – Good (no high-res)
Quantity: 200

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Third Runner-Up — Florida Integrated Science Center

Photos of Florida wildlife, alligators, Everglades, and other coastal climates. They have great shots, but none are larger than a few inches.

Image Quality: Poor – Good (no high-res)
Quantity: A few hundred

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Fourth Runner-Up — National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Includes photos of laboratories, scientists at work, new-age dwellings, and even Housing for Humanity construction projects. The catch is that the site charges $42.00 per high-resolution photo. This restriction is in place despite the fact that there is no copyright on these photos. If you want, however you should be able to get them free by filing a freedom of information act request with the Department of Energy.

Image Quality: Average – Good (high-res for $42.00 fee)
Quantity: Several thousands

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In case these are not enough public domain photo libraries for you, you can find more links to Government photos on USA.gov. However, not all the sites linked from that page contain truly public domain photos, so always read their guidelines for photo usage. Also, I excluded many of the sites at USA.gov, because they were too difficult to use to find good photos.

Please feel free to add comments below if you know of other good Government photo libraries that you recommend!