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APA, MLA, and the Chicago Manual of Style have different rules for how to treat images using captions, in-text references, footnotes, and in your bibliography.
Click here to open the Quick Guide on Finding & Citing Images - this is a text-based Google Doc. This document provides introductory guidance for how to cite images in these main styles, including tips on inserting figures & tables with appropriate captions in your writing.
Even if materials are available with a Creative Commons license or are in the public domain, you should still always cite materials in your research & projects. Whether you’re citing an image that is in the Public Domain, has a CC license, or is under copyright, NYU’s Scholarly Communications librarian has put together a fairly comprehensive guide on practices for citing images. This guide also includes more specific information on different types of Creative Commons licenses.
When considering whether you should or should not cite images that are from stock photo websites or are in the public domain, it is helpful to remember the purpose of these particular types of resources. Stock photos are available to be used for a variety of purposes, particularly non-educational ones, without requiring you to pay a licensing fee to use that image. The fact that photos in the Public Domain or with a CC0 License do not require a fee does not absolve you from the burden of citing these resources in your work, educational or otherwise.
Another useful tool to use when creating your attributions is this Open Attribution Builder. If you have found an image that doesn’t provide a formatted citation, or if you want to make sure your images all have uniformly-formatted citations, this is very useful.
If you’ve found an image, but you don’t know who created it, you should generate a citation/attribution that makes it possible for your reader to access the image, and for the creator to receive credit for their work: this might mean including a URL, the name of the website you, or the username of the uploader.
Microsoft Word allows you to create captions for figures & tables in your text. To insert captions in GoogleDocs, this workaround has proven useful.