Microbiology Resource Guide

Images, videos, and animations of cells, capturing a wide diversity of organisms, cell types, and cellular processes

Archival open-access collection of images for educational and classroom use (Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International).

"NIGMS offers scientific images and videos, plus scientist interviews, profiles, and photos." All are freely available for use with proper attribution.

"Open-i service of the National Library of Medicine enables search and retrieval of abstracts and images (including charts, graphs, clinical images, etc.) from the open source literature, and biomedical image collections."

"Free open-access online database of medical images, teaching cases, and clinical topics, integrating images and textual metadata including over 12,000 patient case scenarios, 9,000 topics, and nearly 59,000 images."

"Growing collection of over 1100 text supported microscopic and macroscopic images and videos drawn from commercially prepared slide collections and live specimens commonly used in the study of Biology, Botany, Zoology, Histology and Microbiology." High quality images released into the public domain.

Created by a Working Group at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the PHIL offers an organized, universal electronic gateway to CDC's pictures.

"Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone." It works like Wikipedia in that everyone can edit, but all images found here are available for reuse via open content licenses or because they are in the public domain.

"CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone...CC Search searches across more than 300 million images [and aggregates] results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution."

Use the Advanced Search or the Tools menu of the results page to limit search results to "Creative Commons License" (screenshot below). Admittedly, their labeling isn't always perfect, so be sure to click through to the original source to save/download the image and record the necessary attribution and license.