The government came out with its best copyright-free photo library yet, NASA Images at www.nasaimages.org!

Search the Best Copyright-Free Photos:

About a year ago, I ranked the top 10 copyright-free photo libraries from the government. NASA came in surprisingly low with the NASA Image Exchange in ninth place, but the new NASA Images site clearly deserves first place.

NASA Images is actually a public—non-profit partnership between NASA and Internet Archive that began in 2007....

U.S. government works are free of copyright (public domain). This includes all videos and films produced by federal employees as part of their official duty. However, limitations may still apply, if copyrighted material appears in a video.

Based on an extensive review of government video libraries, I recommend the following 11 collections. The video libraries are broken into four categories followed by six tips to improve government videos:

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Top News Video Libraries

#1 — DODvClips

Very up-to-date military news in a television newscast format streamed online by the Department of Defense. The site includes several "channels" for top news, interviews, front line stories, and more. The production quality, timeliness, and anchorwoman are professional grade. On the downside: some videos do not have dates, and the "play" and "playlist" buttons are visually associated with the wrong videos.

Production Quality: Excellent!
Update Frequency: Several videos added daily
Accessible?: No—neither captioning nor transcripts...

The Free Government Information blog made an astute observation today that the informative AIDS.gov podcasts are not yet listed among USA.gov's Government-wide podcast listing. This is true despite the fact that AIDS.gov has regularly produced the podcast for 8 months....

Thousands of photos taken by U.S. Government employees as part of their official duty are free of copyright and free to use. Based on my extensive review of government photo libraries, the best collections below. Or just use the search I made.

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#1 — BestPhotos.US

Awesome, high-resolution photos of landscapes, sunsets, mountains, flowers, animals, science, and much more. You can browse or search. You can get the highest resolution available for all the images quite easily.

Image Quality: Excellent!
Quantity: Search millions, browse thousands

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#2 — Agricultural Research Service

Beautiful, high-resolution photos of plants, animals, agriculture, and agricultural research. Browse using the categories on the left. The site displays a request form when you choose to download the high-resolution photo, but you can simply bypass it by clicking “download photo”.

Image Quality: Excellent!
Quantity: A few hundred
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