Clip art and photos

WPClipart is an ever-growing collection of artwork for schoolkids and others that is free of copyright concerns as well as safe from inappropriate images. Use in school research and reports is my main focus when creating, or finding and editing -- but there are photos and clips here that work great for commercial uses, book illustrations, office presentations, and some just for fun...

All the images here are Public Domain. So enjoy, come back often and tell your friends!

Clip of the Day (click the image to see full-size version)	Trout Lily
	Erythronium americanum (aka dogtooth violet) The "trout" moniker is said to come from its leaves resembling the spots on a brook trout. Its tubers are edible raw. Plant disappears in summer, returns the next spring. Grows in colonies. Was able to isolate this specimen by getting the shadow of a large log behind the blossom...

Site Size and Speed

As of Saturday, 05/12/2012 there are 38,1167 unique images, most in multiple formats, yielding a total of 139,397 images to download here at wpclipart. (Plus any you generate using the online image editor :)

According to Alexa (on 03/13/2011):
"Average Load Time for Wpclipart.com
Very Fast (0.235 Seconds), 99% of sites are slower."
It's hard to beat that -- and that's on an image serving site? Awesome!

Finding Images

• Browse

  View the thumbnail pages of images from the "index" page in each folder. There are 48 top-level folders, and they contain thumbnail images and usually several subfolders.



• Search

  Image search is inter-site, and as such is safe and fast. I have written and implimented an algorithm that outputs thumbnail image links of to up to 24 images as the main search results, along with thumbnail links to directories of images to the right. I limit the results to simplify the search, and the listing of directories easily leads searchers to more results. Also, submitting the same search words will yield different results, as I have somewhat randomized what portion of the total results are shown.
  
  You can also add WPClipart as a seach provider to your browser. The small image below shows what it looks like if you were to use it to search for "cat cartoon". Enables you to open your browser and search wpclipart, without even visiting the site!
  
  Click below to add wpclipart search to Internet Explorer or Firefox.
  
  
  
  Add wpclipart search to browser

Purpose:

 WPClipart is a fast, clean and safe site for children and others to find good-quality, printable images that have no copyright restrictions. All the images are in the Public Domain. Ads on pages are minimal (one per page, also one on "related" section of dispplay pages) to eliminate confusion and to make the site as fast as possible.

While there are literally thousands of "fun" images -- I take great pains to find, edit and retouch images of historical and/or general educational value. Browse though American History, flags, geography (maps) and other sections to see what I mean...

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 : ) The only REQUEST I make is that you do not use large numbers of the images in another ONLINE gallery or application -- therefore competing with wpclipart in image searches. 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.

Use with Google Docs

Easy to use wpclipart with Google Docs, see the example I Published to a web page that shows how to insert images without even downloading them.
"Google Docs and WPClipart"

Integrate WPClipart into OpenOffice

If you Download zipped folders of wpclipart, it is easy to integrate all the images into OpenOffice. Do this as so:

1. Start OpenOffice.org
2. Click Tools->Options
3. Click ->paths
4. Click Graphics
5. Click Edit
6. Select the path to the WPClipart files
7. OK

When you go to "Insert > Picture", WPClipart directory will show up. Be sure to check the bottom button for PREVIEW, which makes browsing for the images much easier. (I actually find the wpclipart viewer/editor easier to use, but many folks use just the clipart...)

Image file formats

PNG was chosen as the default format because it is lossless but compressed -- meaning it retains a higher image quality than JPG, makes a much smaller file size than a .tiff, is better supported and versatile than an SVG (especially to convert to/from), and finally, GIF images simply have too limited a color palette.

Despite false information spread by some overzelous SVG supporters, PNG is lossless. From the PNG site at: libpng.org, "Since PNG's compression is fully lossless... restoring and re-saving an image will not degrade its quality..."

WebP emerging file format from Google, meant to speed up the web via smaller file size while retaining quality. Will it replace both JPG and PNG? It just might.

JPG versions of all images are now also available. These are especially useful for use with photographic images and keeping file size reasonable, but also if you link/post to websites, jpg is sometimes allowed while PNG is not.

Transparent images are not used by default because this can cause printing problems with some word processors (AbiWord in particular.) Also, printers do not print white (the usual transparent color) -- so transparency in that case would not make any difference when printed.

However, because folks often want to use these images on the Web (sometimes over backgrounds and colors), and also sometimes combine images, one image over part of another -- then preserving portions of the image that need to stay white (as opposed to transparent) becomes important. Because of this I very often have to selectively make portions of images transparent, which can be a bit time consuming. I have been working (un)steadily at it for some time now. Transparent PNG versions are becoming available for most all (non-photographic) images.

And last but not least, SVG versions of images are now also beginning to be included.

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, rocks and minerals, 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 represent.

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

Camera work at WPClipart

All the photographs I take are presently done with an Olympus E-500 I bought in 2006 along with a macro lens. Photos appear in "plants/Pauls_Garden", "plants/Tennessee_Flora", quite a few animal pix, some computer parts, my daughters eye closeup and probably more I don't remember...

I also use a macro lens to digitize images from out-of-copyright books. Many of the images in fictional characters, American History, world history and images from several other sections were digitized using my Olympus.

Downloading

Despite the serious advantage of using the online search function, there are times when internet access is not available. With that in mind, sections of the collection can be downloaded as zipped folders. Downloads are hosted by both ibiblio. See the download page for the installer as well as zipped sections of clip art.

There is also a viewer/editor application I programmed in pyGTK. It is not needed to use the graphics, but it serves 3 very useful purposes:

1. Browse the collection with nice size thumbnails


2. Quick and simple edits to rotate, filter or adjust color/brightness of images


3. COPY TO CLIPBOARD function, which means that if you have a document open in Word, OpenOffice, AbiWord or others - you just PASTE and you have the image in your document. No need to navigate through menus to insert a picture and then have to search through your machine.
   With wpclipper just copy to clipboard, and back in your document paste. Sweet.

Due to the size of the collection (as well as throughput problems on Ibiblio,) downloads of the collection must be done in parts, and the downloads are sometime throttled (Ibiblio has found it necessary to meter and limit.)

It became apparent that after updating the downloads my traffic would steadily decrease. Less folks needed to visit, and some other webmasters would download the collection only to repost all the images on their sites and garner the traffic I once had... this site's revenue had fallen nearly to the point of not being feasible to run any more, that's when I stopped updating the downloads. Since that time traffic has slowly increased again.

So I am sorry the downloads aren't all up-to-date, but giving everything away to use offline was effectively killing the website.

Privacy Policy

WPClipart
Does NOT use cookies or any registration or login or attempt to gather any information on any visitor whatsoever. Apache logs are kept to track/prevent any malicious activity on-site, but are checked and dumped daily (deleted permanently, without backup).

Advertising
WPClipart uses advertising from Google. They run ads that I believe are appropriate for this site's audience. I have yet to see an ad be crude or overly intrusive. The ad layout onsite is never meant to confuse ads with content. There is only one ad per page (and one in the "related" iframe page that appears below the image display pages.)

That said, Google is a contexual advertiser, and as such they use anonymous cookies on the user's machine to track web visiting habits. (In order to serve targeted ads.) However, since Google is part of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) you have the ability to OPT OUT of the use of their tracking cookies. Ads are still served, just no cookie is used, and no tracking information is collected as you visit. To see the NAI opt-out list:
the NAI opt-out page

The privacy policy concerning Google advertising (with the opt-out option) is:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/ads/

By opting out, your preference not to be tracked will be honored by these agencies wherever you go, not just here at WPClipart. (See below)

"The NAI has adopted a policy that all NAI member companies set a minimum lifespan of five years for their opt out cookies." Click here for more information.

Funding

Help support WPClipart . . .
The site makes money through advertising; not the kind of money a body can live off of, but more than enough to pay for the server rental, auto-backups, etc. Beyond that whatever money I make enables me to devote more time to my project here. So if you'd like to donate a couple bucks through PayPal, feel free and much appreciated!