The NHS Photo Library is a great source of stock photos for use by NHS organisations. It contains over 4000 health and care related images which are fully searchable online.The site has images relating to a wide variety of settings and health related activities including:
- Primary care
- Community care
- Secondary care/hospitals
- Healthy living/health promotion
- Patient and public involvement
- Medical science & technology
- Health care buildings & signage
The site also has some useful features, like the lightbox which enables you to create and store sets of photos for easy access.
You can download the images directly, or you can request them to be sent to you on a CD (although there is a charge for the latter).
The images are available for use for the majority of NHS communications, including web sites, newsletters, annual reports, patient information leaflets and other publications.
The only exclusion to this is press releases as media outlets are not licensed to use them.
Access to the NHS Photo Library is completely free but restricted to NHS organisations, local authority social care and public health staff. You will need to register with an official work email address (.nhs.uk/.nhs.net) in order to gain access.
The NHS Photo Library is a really useful source of high quality photos that allows you to use them in a wide variety of ways whilst not having to worry about copyright issues.
