Creative Commons Launches a Streamlined Search Featuring 300 Million Images and Improved Attribution

Creative Commons, the organization that helps people legally share images and other data online for the common good, has launched a brand new, streamlined search function that queries over 300 million images in the public domain or that have a Creative Commons license. The images come from a variety of resources that include universities, institutions, and photo-sharing sites (with user’s permission).

CC Search searches images across 19 collections pulled from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset, including cultural works from museums (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art), graphic designs and artworks (Behance, DeviantArt), photos from Flickr, and an initial set of CC0 3D designs from Thingiverse.

The organization has made a number of improvements upon its previous search function to make it more streamlined and easier to use, with improved attribution.

Aesthetically, you’ll see some key changes — a cleaner home page, better navigation and filters, design alignment with creativecommons.org, streamlined attribution options, and clear channels for providing feedback on both the overall function of the site and on specific image reuses. It’s also now linked directly from the Creative Commons homepage as the default method to search for CC-licensed works, and replaces the old search portal.