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Hunter Library
Research Guides
Western Carolina University

Interior Design

Resources for students and faculty in the interior design program.

Image Resources

Library Resources:

Images on the Open Web

Museums and archives offer a huge range of images, including images of furniture,textiles, and complete interiors. Most of the images are meant for educational purposes only, but they will identify items that outside of copyright and can be used for a variety of purposes. Here is a small selection of sites to get you started.


If you are looking for images to you use for your portfolio or for anything you plan to post on the open web, you need to make sure you have permission to use the content you've chosen. Looking for images from sites that offer images with Creative Commons licenses. The easiest option is to find images with a CC-0 license. See the citing sources page for more info on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons - A Quick Intro

By Aditya Dipanker of Folography. -- Click on image to see larger version.

There are many sites around the web that offer content on Creative Commons (CC) licenses. There are even a few sites that offer nothing but CC-0 licenses, which mean that you don't have to cite them if you don't want to. The "Find Images" tab offers a number of sources but it is by no means a complete list.

There are also sites (like NYPL digital collections) that offer a number of images with no known copyright restrictions. This determination is often, but not always, made using the age of the item. If you are looking for images to use in works that you posting online and/or selling you need to consider where the item is coming from.

If you have questions or want help locating images for a project feel free to contact the art librarian. Contact info is located on the home page of this guide.

An ideal attribution for a Creative Commons item includes:

  • Title: In quotation marks and linked to the item on its original page
  • Author: For online material it will typically be a username and not a real name. Ideally it is linked to the author's page on the site you retrieved the image.
  • License: The license assigned by the author to the item (e.g. CC BY 2.0) and linked to the appropriate license page provided by CC.

See the 'Citation Example' tab for examples of images with attributions.

For instructions and best practices creating attributions for items you've modified, items with multiple sources, etc. click on the link below to find more information:

Example of CC attribution for an item found on Flickr:

"Mona Lisa" by waltjabsco is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Example of CC attribution for an item found on Pixabay. You are not required to attribute works with a CC0 license but it is good practice to give credit to the creator of an image:

"Bull landscape nature mammal" by RonBerg is licensed under CC-0