Finding and Using Media: Locating Images

Image collections at museums around the world.

"Explore thousands of artworks in the museum’s wide-ranging collection—from our world-renowned icons to lesser-known gems from every corner of the globe—as well as our books, writings, reference materials, and other resources."

Over one million public domain images from publications from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Largely unorganized.

The DPLA offers a single point of access to millions of items—photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States.

Over 48 million "artworks, artefacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe." Most with Creative Commons licenses.

The Getty Search Gateway allows users to search across several of the Getty repositories, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. Images may be copyrighted. See "Getty Open Content Images" under the "Public Domain Image Collections" menu to search only public domain images.

American Memory is a multimedia web site of digitized historical documents, photographs, sound recordings, moving pictures, books, pamphlets, maps, and other resources from the Library of Congress’s vast holdings. Each American Memory collection is accompanied by a more specific copyright statement that links from its home page.

Millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google. For personal non-commercial use only.

Digitized materials from Loyola University New Orleans’ Special Collections and Archives are available in the LOUISiana Digital Library.

The LOUISiana Digital Library (LDL) is an online library of Louisiana institutions that provides over 144,000 digital materials. Its purpose is to make unique historical treasures from the Louisiana institution's archives, libraries, museums, and other repositories in the state electronically accessible to Louisiana residents and to students, resear

Digital library collections from Loyola's Special Collections & Archives. Includes university archives (Wolf Yearbook, Maroon newspaper, photos) and special collections (books, pamphlets, and more).

Non-copyrighted photo, audio, and video of NASA space flights, astronomy, and aeronautics.

This webpage provides links to public domain digital images of many of those sites, including national parks, monuments, battlefields, historic sites and related areas.
All images posted in this archive are free, and may be used without a copyright release from the National Park Service, but must not be used to imply NPS endorsement without permission.

NYPL Digital Gallery provides free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections. Some of the images in the Digital Gallery may be subject to third party rights such as copyright and/or rights of privacy/publicity. Before using any of these images please review the Library's Terms and Conditions.

The Smithsonian Institution Archives contributes collection images to the Flickr Commons where the Content is described as having “no known copyright restriction.” Content is available for personal and non-commercial educational uses consistent with the principles of fair use. If you decide to use the Content for commercial or other purposes without undertaking to clear all rights, you will be responsible if someone else owns the rights and the owner objects to your use.

Find government photos and images by topic. Some of these photos are in the public domain or U.S. government works and may be used without permission or fee. However, some images may be protected by license or copyright.

Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).According to the Library of Congress: "Most photographs in this collection are considered to be in the public domain; however, labels on a few images indicate that they may be restricted. Privacy and publicity rights may also apply." More information is at the LoC website: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html

Over 70,000 free for classroom use. From the University of South Florida.

Photos for classroom use. From the University of South Florida.

Convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations for images with Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. CC has no control over the results that are returned with this portal, so always verify that the work is actually under a CC license by following the link.

Search for CC licensed content including filters for kind of license, where to search, and some specific collections. May act unpredictably, as it's still in beta.

Searches only public domain images from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute.

Use the "Usage Rights" drop-down menu at the bottom to find images available for reuse.

Over 12 million historic images from out-of-copyright books posted by the Internet Archive. Search by tag or browse.

Contains over 375,000 images of art in the public domain from the Met's collections.

Search and browse by subject, artist, title, format or technique. Color and black and white. Be sure to see Terms of Use: no guarantee is made that images are noninfringing.

OpenPhoto is a niche photo sharing platform. Contributors offer their images for free under terms of Creative Commons licensing. Acceptable usage conditions vary from image to image.

From Planet Labs, a non-governmental satellite image company. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Locate Creative Commons CC0 license images and video clips for reuse.

Download thousands of historic media files for your creative projects. Registration required to download.

Free HD public domain photos.

Scientific and medical images from medieval to early modern. "The images are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence."

A database of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

Associated Press Images offers a range of rights managed images commonly used by advertisers and publishers. They can be used for a limited time and limited use based on the licensing agreement. Rights Managed grants exclusive, time-limited, and geographic-specific use.

Online creative resource for advertisers, publishers, websites and other photo users looking for exceptional stock imagery, royalty-free photos, and microstock images. Royalty Free grants non-exclusive, unlimited use of an image.

A commercial library of photographs. See their social media image use info at http://www.gettyimages.com/Creative/Frontdoor/embed.