Image sources

Where the pictures come from, what you may do with them, and how each one keeps its credit.

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Section 1. The nine sources

One search asks several sources at once and lays what they send back into a single list:

  • Pixabay — free photos, illustrations and vectors.
  • Pexels — free stock photography.
  • Openverse — openly licensed pictures from across the web.
  • Unsplash — photographer-submitted photos, shown from Unsplash.
  • Icons and line art — plain outlines and symbols, the easiest shapes to trace.
  • Smithsonian — museum artwork and specimens released to the public domain.
  • iNaturalist — photographs of animals and plants taken by nature watchers.
  • NASA — space photography from NASA missions.
  • Google Images — wider web image search.

Our server sends the source the search term and nothing else — no email address, no display name and no account identifier, and the credentials for the sources never leave that server. The pictures themselves are loaded by your phone directly from the source, so its servers see your device’s IP address and browser details, as any website you open does. A saved Unsplash picture is shown from Unsplash every time, so that continues for as long as you keep it. The data use policy sets out the whole path a search takes.

Safe Search is enforced on every source that offers it — Pixabay, Openverse, Unsplash and Google Images. The rest are curated collections — museum, nature and space archives, an icon set, and a moderated stock-photo library — chosen because their catalogues are suitable to begin with.

It is not a setting, there is no switch for it anywhere in the app, and it does not change with the age of the account. Words we will not search for are turned away before any source is asked, which is the one filter that applies to every source alike.

Section 3. Choosing sources

The Sources control on the search screen turns individual sources on and off for your own searches, and puts them back to the app default in one tap. Whichever you pick, only sources the app has enabled are ever queried.

Results are cached for about a day, so repeating a search does not keep hitting the sources.

Section 4. Credit and licences

Every preview shows where the picture came from and, where the source supplies it, the creator and the licence. “View source” opens the original page. A picture you save keeps that credit, so you can find the original again later.

Sketch Anything does not own these pictures and cannot give you rights to them. The licence on the preview screen is the one that counts — check it before a drawing goes anywhere beyond your own sketchbook. Section 6 of the terms and conditions says the same thing as a term of the agreement.

Section 5. Pictures in our screenshots

The screenshots on this website are real captures of the app, so the pictures inside them are real results from the sources above. Here is who made each one:

  • Sierra Nevada Red Fox — David Willingham, CC BY, on iNaturalist. It is the fox on the home page, in Draw Mode and in the Trace Mode illustration.
  • Canadian Tiger Swallowtail — Nancy Mullin, CC0, on iNaturalist.
  • Silvery Checkerspot on a toad — Andy Wilson, CC0, on iNaturalist.
  • “The Butterfly Vent” — NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington, public domain, on NASA Images.
  • “Butterfly Ejecta” — NASA/JPL/Arizona State University, public domain, on NASA Images.
  • “Elephant family” — Colin the Scot, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, on Flickr, through Openverse.
  • “butterfly 3” — Vicky Brock, CC BY-SA 2.0, on Flickr, through Openverse.
  • “Butterfly” — Sunny M5, CC BY-NC 2.0, on Flickr, through Openverse.

The butterfly and rocket symbols are from the Material Design Icons and Material Symbols sets, by Pictogrammers and Google, through Iconify, under Apache 2.0.

Section 6. Pictures we do not copy

Unsplash asks that its photographs are shown from Unsplash rather than copied elsewhere. Saving one keeps a link to the original instead of a stored copy, which is why those pictures need a connection to appear — and why Unsplash’s servers see your device every time you open one, for as long as you keep it. Saving one also makes our server tell Unsplash that the picture was downloaded, which its API terms require.

Everything else you save is fetched once by our server, converted, and stored with its attribution so it still opens when you are offline.

Section 7. Reporting a picture

If a result looks wrong for a family audience, use the information button on the preview screen to report it. Reports go straight to the moderation queue and the picture is looked at by a person.

Section 8. If a picture is yours

If you made a picture that Sketch Anything is showing and you want it taken out of the app, write to [email protected] with a link to it and a way to tell it apart. We will remove it and, where we can, tell the source it came from.

If you would rather send a formal copyright notice, Section 9 of the terms and conditions sets out what to include and where to send it, and how to reply if we have taken something down by mistake.

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