Art, Art History & Museum Studies

When is it ok to use copyrighted images in your creative and academic work? The College Art Association (CAA) has compiled a list of best practices for students, professors, writers, artists and art professionals to use in their work.

Searchable archive of images from major museums; emphasis is on twentieth century fine art. Images are for purchase and contain watermarks--should be used for browsing only.

The Maker Hub (located on the first floor of Lauinger Library) provides access to specialized tools, like 3D printers, laser cutters, and fabrication supplies. It is designed to help self-directed inventors and creative teams gather and share resources and knowledge. Among its tools and supplies, the Maker Hub has 150,000 fine art slides available for creative reuse.

High-res images of artworks housed in participating museums, including the Tate Gallery, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; and the Uffizi, Florence.

Includes free stock photography, much of which is licensed under a CC0 License -- free to use for any purpose without attribution.

Includes lots of free to use stock images.

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed media content. Wikimedia Commons has a page where you can browse all of their Creative Commons licensed images.

Search more than 21,000 records of individual objects in the Georgetown University Art Collections. They include predominantly works on paper in addition to paintings, sculpture, and decorative objects. About a third of the records have accompanying images, with more added over time. The images are provided for study and academic use only.

NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. More than 20,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use.

Access to over 2 million images. Option to have high-resolution images sent to you as long as they're for educational use.

More than 406,000 hi-res images of public-domain works in The Met collection are available.

The Getty makes available, without charge, more than 99,000 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, however images must be attributed to the Getty Open Content Program.

Google has collaborated with 17 museums to view artwork on display. Navigate virtually through galleries, examine individual artwork, or create an artwork collection.

The Smithsonian provides access to nearly 3 million images from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

These images of art from the collections of the V&A are available for certain non-commercial uses, including some academic publishing. Read the full Terms of Use to see if your use qualifies.

Browse the History of Medicine and Medical collections or the Digitized content."The Library's digital collections cover a wide variety of topics, including asylums, food, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health and war."

Digitized historic photographs, advertisements, texts & more from Duke's unique library collections.

Photography and moving images as well as film and camera technology are featured.

Rights information displayed prominently on each record.

Fully digitized, browsable magazines from 1930-70s.

Spanning a wide range of historical eras, geography, and media, NYPL Digital Collections offers drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, videos, audio, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of The Library, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences.

Digitized NYT photos available in "Past Tense," an archival storytelling project, using the NYT photo library.

Search featured collections or browse by subject. Copyright status may vary: Please pay close attention to the "Rights Advisory" in each record. If in doubt, refer to the Library's Copyright page.

Collection of scanned images from public-domain books. Free to use.

Over 100,000 high resolution historical images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements. Images available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.