Loras College Library: Free Image Collections: Home

FREE IMAGE COLLECTIONS

Guidelines for Using Open Image Collections

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. From Wikipedia: "Fair Use."

Unless otherwise directed, always attribute the source of an image when using it. Include, if possible, the creator of the work, the title, year when work was completed, materials involved, housing institution, date retrieved, website.

Free Image Collections

National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
Acting in its capacity to "serve the United States in a national role by preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the understanding of works of art," the National Gallery of Art (NGA) has made images of 20,000 of its works accessible to educators, scholars, and the general public. The NGA hopes to continue to add images to the database, including those that currently have an uncertain copyright status.
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Collection (PPOC)
The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) contains catalog records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress offers broad public access to these materials as a contribution to education and scholarship.
Getty Images
The photography licensing company now allows users to visit its website, grab some embed code (no copies or downloads), and display an image on blogs and social media pages without paying a licensing fee, making it easy, legal, and free for anybody to share their images on websites, blogs, and social media platforms. The embedding tool is intended only for noncommercial uses.
The British Library on Flikr
The British Library has uploaded one million public domain scans from 17th- to 19th-century books to Flikr.
Getty Musuem - Open Content Program
There are now thousands of images from the J. Paul Getty Museum available in high resolution on the Getty's website for use without restriction—representing objects (some images show more than one object), including paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, antiquities and sculpture and decorative arts. The Getty plans to add other images, until eventually all applicable Getty-owned or public domain images are available, without restrictions, online.
Flikr Commons
The Commons collates photography with "no known copyright restrictions" from institutions around the world. Its archive is predominantly from English-speaking countries, including both Australia and New Zealand's National Libraries.
Wikipedia Featured Pictures
WFP highlights images that the Wikipedia community finds beautiful, stunning, impressive, or informative. The collection stays updated as Wikipedia editors find gorgeous high-quality images on the site.
Rijks Museum
The digital image collection of the Netherlands's state museum, Rijks Studio encompasses 125,000 images right now and will expand until it includes the Rijksmuseum's more than one million holdings.
Calisphere
Calisphere is the University of California's free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 200,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts — reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history.
NASA - National Aeronautical & Space Administration
NASA makes both astronomy and historical photos available from the multimedia page of its website.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
More than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works in the Museum’s collection may be downloaded directly from the Museum’s website for non-commercial use—including in scholarly publications in any media—without permission from the Museum and without a fee. The number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis. Works that are covered by the new policy are identified on the Museum’s website with the acronym OASC (Open Access for Scholarly Content).
Google Cultural Institute
Exhibits and collections from museums and archives all around the world.
Unsplash
Over 300,000 free high-resolution photos brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.

Looking for even more?

Check out the Open Collections Directory from OpenGLAM:

Open Collections | OpenGLAM