The library has two halves and they are not the same kind of thing. It is worth knowing which one you are captioning.
Counts update as the library grows.
Sourced from Wikimedia Commons, and filtered to CC0 and public domain only. These are yours: use them commercially, modify them, post the result anywhere, and you owe nobody a credit line.
That filter is deliberately strict. Images under CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, or any non-commercial or no-derivatives licence are excluded — not because they are bad, but because each would quietly hand you an obligation. A share-alike picture would make your meme share-alike; an attribution licence would owe a credit on something you post. A caption is a derivative work, so a no-derivatives image is one this site cannot use at all.
The photographer is recorded and shown for every one of them even though no licence here requires it. Credit that is not owed is cheap; provenance that was never captured cannot be reconstructed.
The canonical formats — Drake, Distracted Boyfriend, Two Buttons — drawn from the public template APIs published by imgflip and memegen.link.
These are a different matter and this page will not pretend otherwise. Neither service owns most of those pictures: they are film stills, press and stock photographs, and photographs of real people. Nobody can license them to you and this site does not claim to. They are here because they are the shared vocabulary of the form, and they are carried with a takedown process that is honoured on receipt and permanently — see the terms.
If you are making something commercial, the public-domain half above is the half to use.
The editor keeps them on separate shelves. Meme formats is the classic set and is what opens by default; Inspiration is the public-domain photography, sorted into Animals, Faces & reactions, Life & moments and Work & study. Everything shows both.
The Inspiration shelf is there because free photographs caption beautifully as something other than a joke — a line of text over a mountain climber is a real thing people make, and this half of the library is good at it in a way it will never be good at Distracted Boyfriend. Every genre is sampled in the free tier, so you can see the range before deciding whether the rest is worth paying for.
Open any template and a green chip reading CC0 — yours to use or PD — yours to use marks the openly-licensed half. No chip means a classic format.
Write to the contact address with a link or the template name. No formal notice is needed and one will not make it faster. Removal is actioned on receipt and is permanent: the image is blocklisted so the nightly sync cannot restore it, and it stops being served from this domain altogether.
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