Media repositories for e-learning

A small repository of good-quality, variable-resolution photos sorted by broad-brush categories. Searchable.

A large repository of high-quality photos of plants, animals, fossils, people, and landscapes. Thumbnail indices, medium-res images online, high-res images on request from author. Usage restrictions detailed in each record. Searchable and browsable.

A meta-search engine for free stock photography, indexing sources such as stock.xchng and Flickr. Over 3 million images are indexed.

An enormous photo-sharing community, many of the images in which are licenced under Creative Commons - check image record for licencing info. To find CC images, use the Advanced Search and tick the Creative Commons box at the bottom of the form.

A large library of high-quality photos and textures, produced by multimedia designers. The concentration is on nature, objects, architecture, and vehicles - there are no people photos at all.

A unique feature is the abstract search, where you can look for a type of image (bright, soft, glossy, etc) rather than an image of something. You can also create your own downloadable clippings library (similar to sets in Flickr).

A bank of "free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use". Thumbnail and low-res views online, high-res images downloadable as .zip files.Sorted by broad-brush categories, browsable and searchable.

A growing library of high-quality stock photography, sorted by category, contributed under Creative Commons licences. A nice touch is that when you select a photo, thumbnails of similar photos are displayed.

A small public domain repository, browsable and searchable. Only a few top-level categories, and no "people" category.

The author's personal repository of images taken by himself. Browsable only by CD number, but searchable. They mostly seem to be landscapes, places and animals.

Hiqh-quality stock photography and some 3-D drawings, categorised by topic with a search engine.

A very large repository of high-quality photography, categorised and searchable. Thumbnail views, photos available in medium- and high-res. Each image record lists the restrictions, if any, placed on usage by the contributor.

"The Wikimedia Commons is a project that provides a central repository for free images, music, sound & video clips and, possibly, texts and spoken texts, used in pages of any Wikimedia project."

A large, categorised archive of public domain vector images, including a good medical images section with a handful of high-quality anatomical diagrams.

A large, categorised archive of mostly CC-licenced vector images in Adobe Illustrator (AI) and Enhanced PostScript (EPS) formats.. No directly educational categories, but useful for standard clipart.

Searchable but uncategorised vector image archive.

A large and growing collection of high-quality vector clipart (SVG format) made available under the CC licence. Searchable and browseable. Tip: you can use the Open Source graphics application Inkscape to edit SVG images.

Large, searchable archive of stock vector imagery in a wide range of categories.

A medium-sized image repository, comprising mainly photos of plants, animals, bacteria and viruses, maintained by the HEA Subject Centre for Bioscience. Browsable and searchable. The terms & conditions of use explicitly allow image use in public materials, including websites and CAL, in non-profit educational contexts only.

A large resource collection aimed at those involved in health sciences, comprising images, presentations, websites, etc. Indexed, searchable, and browsable, by MeSH. Some resources are available under CC licences. Usage and rights details in resource records.

A collection of high-quality medical illustrations used in the book "The Sourcebook of Medical Illustration", made available for public use by the University of Minnesota.

A library of images and presentation material illuminating the study of visual perception, sorted by topic, eg Anatomy & Physiology, Colour (including colour deficiency) , Development, etc. Searchable and browsable. Any educational use is permitted, including usage on public websites.

A searchable collection of high-quality, copyright-cleared video and animation clips in a range of Life Science categories, including Biochemistry and Medicine. Rather than being downloadable, the clips are made available as streaming video for incorporation in websites, VLEs, presentations, and so on. You choose a video to use, and bandwidth required, then you receive a URL to link to. Browsable and searchable by category.