# Guides: free images, licences and formats

> Short, answer-first guides for designers, writers and AI assistants: whether an image may be used commercially, how to credit it, what museum open access, NASA and Creative Commons allow, icons and transparent files, and how to let an agent pick images for you.

## Licensing

- [Free images for commercial use: what you can actually use](https://image.shep.bot/guides/free-images-commercial-use.md): You can use an image commercially when its licence says so: CC0 and public-domain images with no conditions, CC BY images with a credit line, and free stock licences such as Unsplash's or Pexels' within their terms.
- [How to credit CC BY images on websites, slides and print](https://image.shep.bot/guides/credit-cc-by-images.md): Name the image, its author, where it came from and its licence with a link, and say if you changed it, for example: “Lake Louise at sunrise” by Jane Doe (Wikimedia Commons), CC BY 4.0, cropped.
- [Museum open access: free public-domain art you can reuse](https://image.shep.bot/guides/museum-open-access-art.md): The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art release photographs of their public-domain works under CC0: you may print, crop, recolour and sell them without asking or crediting anyone.
- [Using NASA images: credit, logos and astronauts](https://image.shep.bot/guides/nasa-image-rules.md): NASA photos are generally not copyrighted in the US, so you may use them commercially with a credit such as 'Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech'.

## Production

- [Free SVG icons and transparent PNGs: finding and using them](https://image.shep.bot/guides/transparent-png-and-svg-icons.md): Search for the subject plus 'icon', 'svg' or 'transparent' (for example 'rocket icon' or 'coffee cup transparent png'): those words become filters.

## AI agents

- [Let an AI agent find and license images for your project](https://image.shep.bot/guides/ai-agent-find-and-license-images.md): Add the MCP server (claude mcp add --transport http images https://image.shep.bot/mcp) and ask for what you need: 'a hero image of a mountain lake and three feature icons for the landing page'.

Glossary of image and licence terms: https://image.shep.bot/glossary.md

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Source: https://image.shep.bot/guides