Clip art and photos

  WPClipart is a collection of high-quality public domain images specifically tailored for use in word processors and optimized for printing on home/small office inkjet printers. There are thousands of color graphic clips as well as illustrations, photographs and black and white line art. All are in lossless, PNG format. As of Wednesday, 05/12/2008 there are 21,005 images.

Pic of the Week

Still early Spring in Upstate New York. My wife likes these bleeding hearts. The sun in August seems to over-power them if not growing in the shade, but they do their thing nicely early in the season. I used my trusty Olympus E-500 in the evening, then loaded the image with the GIMP, filtering the photo with my "photo to graphic" script, (plus a bit of cleaning-up.) [I liked this one enough to bump "Pic of the Day" up to a week.] --Paul Sherman

Description

 This is a clean and safe site for children and others to find good-quality, printable images.

Except for a few "fair use" items -- namely company logos (like the company name on a credit card) or recognizable products (like a particular model cell phone) -- all the rest of the images are Public Domain. If you want to use one for a project or a web page, there is no need to ask nor any requirement to attibute or link back to this site. (Appreciated, but not necessary.)

While I realize folks trying to be courteous will generally want to ask first, I get several requests a day and responding to each becomes time consuming. I would feel badly if I were to ignore someone's email... so please, feel free to use the images with my unwritten blessing : ) If you have any questions you are welcome to email me. But please take a peek at the "legal" and/or the "legal FAQ" pages first... one of them may have the answer to your question.



Finding Images

Browse the collection or do a site-specific image search.

There are 48 top-level folders, and they contain thumbnail images and subfolders. An example is animals/aquatic/shark, where you would find (at the date of this writing) 27 images of sharks.

The site search feature appears on every page and searches only within WPClipart. The search is fast and thorough yet does not yield any outside results that may have led to untoward images or pages with a dozen ads per page or links to links to links . . .



Non-transparent

I realize lots of folks would like transparent versions of the images (to paste over other images or parts of documents) -- but I originally started the project for my kids, who used AbiWord in grade school and middle school. AbiWord does not like to print transparent images (they come out all black when I try... and that still holds true for version 2.5, which I currently use.) There are thousands of kids who use AbiWord and there may be other editors which also have a transparent image printing problem.

So it comes down to a question of priorities and I wanted the kids who used whatever program to be able to use and print them without trouble... even if the utility of the images was somehow limited -- that is to say, folks who need transparency would find them more difficult to work with.



Retouching examples

There are loads of "fun" images at WPClipart, but a big part of what is being attempted here has to do with historical/research value. Maps, geography, flags, historical figures, American History, religion, mythology -- these are not popular or fashionable image groups, but they can be quite useful in documentation, school papers and, ultimately, to enable people to get a more visceral feel for who and what the images are of . . .

Toward this end I have done a lot of retouching of images, at times taking some "artistic license" by manipulating the originals. I can attest that in the case of historical photos, this is never done with an eye to change any impression put forward by the original -- editing is done first and foremost to ensure that if a visitor needs to reprint the image, usually scaled down and on a modest inkjet printer, then the details of the image will still be visible.

For a few examples of historical figures see the retouched examples page



Downloading

Despite the serious advantage of using the online search function, there are times when internet access is not available. With that in mind, the entire collection can be downloaded as a package. This package includes the useful (but not necessary) viewer/editor. See the download page for either the Windows installer or the zipped version of the collection.



More about WPClipart

For terms of use, changelogs and some background information about this site and the images, see the about page