Helping Content Creators Find & Use Free Content
Openverse is a Creative Commons project that aims to make it easier for content creators to find and use free content. It’s a search engine that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone by providing access to millions of images from various sources, including Flickr, Unsplash, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
You can spend way too many hours looking for free images for your posts. And if you’re a regular blogger, buying images all the time can add up. We wrote about where to find some fabulous and free images here.
Openverse began as a separate project from WordPress. But since March of 2023, Openverse has been integrated into the WordPress editor to help content creators to access free Creative Commons content from the block inserter in a page or post.
A Little Background about Openverse
Openverse only includes “Creative Commons Zero” (CC0) licensed works. Zero licensed work means that you can use and modify these images without giving credit or mention to the image creators (sometimes referred to as attribution). You can also remove captions.
In other words, any content creator can use, modify and distribute CC0 images for any purpose without asking for permission or crediting the creator.
How to Work with Openverse
Before you start, note that the image you choose will be uploaded to your media library and inserted into your page or post. So if you play around with a lot of images, make sure to go back and delete the ones you didn’t use.
- Click on the block inserter plus icon in the top left corner
- Select the Media tab – to the right of Patterns
- Select Openverse
- Insert a descriptive word of what image you are looking for
- Now you’ll see a preview of your choices
- Click the image you best suits your content.
- Now use your block editing tools at the top of your block to
- Set the image alignment
- Add a link or add text to the image
- Add text over the image
- Next use the Block setting and styles tabs (on the right-hand side) to further modify your image.
- Click “Save draft”
What’s really great about Openverse is that you can find free images
WordPress continues to make content creation and publishing easier for everyone. That’s what we love about it.