Research Guides: Finding & Using Images: Image Resources

Resources @ Hunter

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
A collection of more than 2 million images that document artistic traditions across many cultures and time periods: architecture, sculpture, photography, design as well as other forms of visual culture.
Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
Use this article database to search for charts, graphs, maps, illustrations and other images. Using the advanced search option you can select types of images you want to see and tell the database to bring back results of your search that contain images.

Museum Collections

U.S. Museums

Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection Online The Metropolitan Museum of Art is committed to making a broad range of digital images of artworks in the public domain widely and freely available for scholarly and academic publication. To assist in navigating the vast image content on this website, the Museum has implemented Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC). Through OASC, artworks in the Collection section of the website which the Museum believes to be in the public domain and free of other known restrictions have been identified by an icon, Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) Icon; images associated with these artworks can be downloaded for license- and cost-free scholarly and academic publication, according to the Terms and Conditions.
Smithsonian Collections Search Center The Smithsonian Collections Search Center is an online catalog containing most of Smithsonian major collections from their museums, archives, libraries, and research units. There are 9.0 million catalog records relating to areas for Art & Design, History & Culture, and Science & Technology with 1,085,400 images, videos, audio files, podcasts, blog posts and electronic journals.
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. You can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 45,000 open access digital images up to 4000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.
Getty Search Gateway The Getty is making available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required. Currently, the collection contains over 100,000 images.
Art Institute of Chicago The museum's online collections offer access to over 87,000 works and basic information about works of art from all areas of their encyclopedic collection.
The Guggenheim The online collection of the Guggenheim museum features nearly 1600 works by 575 artists. It is meant to be a reflection of the museums full collection of more than 7,000 items.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) LACMA has made 20,000 items from their collection available online. You can limit your search of the collection to items in the public domain.
Museum of Fine Art (MFA) Boston The images of collections from the MFA are available for personal and educational use provided that proper citation is given.

Library Collections

New York Public Library Digital Collections
Access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more. Usage rights are posted with each image.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
"The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. Far more than a search engine, the portal provides innovative ways to search and scan through the united collection of millions of items, including by timeline, map, virtual bookshelf, format, subject, and partner."
Library of Congress Arts & Culture Collection
Exhibitions created by the LOC are organized by subject area. Each exhibition includes photos and other content along with any associated public programs.

American Memory This link opens in a new window
American Memory is a gateway to the Library of Congress's vast resources of digitized American historical materials which include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. Collections may be browsed individually, searched individually (including full-text searching for many written items), or searched across multiple collections.

Creative Commons Images

Pixabay Public Domain Images "All images and videos on Pixabay are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0. You may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty-free for anything you like, even in commercial applications. Attribution is not required."
Flickr Commons Searches across image collections from a variety of libraries and other archives like the Smithsonian. A wealth of treasures, with clear statements about copyright restrictions for each image.
Flickr This photo sharing site is a great place to look for visual materials. Make sure to use the search tools to limit to material with a creative commons license or items without any copyright restrictions.
NASA Images Because NASA is part of the US government their images do not have any copyright and are part of the public domain.
Wikimedia Commons "Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone."
Google Images Search for images across the web. Make use of the search tool option to limit your search to items with creative commons licenses for re-use.

Finding & Using Images

Image Resources

Resources @ Hunter

Museum Collections

Library Collections

Creative Commons Images

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