Pages for organizations, institutions and libraries that have put their resources online. Many schools, libraries and museums have done this now, but these are some of the biggest.
If adding resources, no aggregators, please. They tend to destroy original source information. It’s actually quite difficult to even find a search engine that will consistently return results that actually respect the provenance of the work.
Global Collections
Flickr, the Internet Archive, Europeana, are all potential technology partners for organizations that aren’t building their own infrastructure. Can get hits from several entities using these resources. Wikipedia and Wikimedia provide individual user based submissions at this time.
- Flickr Commons – https://www.flickr.com/commons
- The Internet Archive – https://archive.org
- Europe Based Collaborative Collection: https://www.europeana.eu/en/collections
- WikiPedia Featured Images – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_pictures
- Wikimedia – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
California
- California Digital Library & Calishpere (UC) Aggregates many California Institutions
- eScholarship.org (UC System Open Access Resources) – https://escholarship.org
- UC Berkley Free Resources Hub – https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/c.php?g=384152&p=2603989
- UCLA Images Search Hub – https://guides.library.ucla.edu/c.php?g=180361&p=8487528
- Getty Open Content
- California Revealed – https://californiarevealed.org/collections/public-domain
- LACMA – https://collections.lacma.org
Other US Based Museums & Institutions
- Smithsonian Institute – https://www.si.edu/openaccess
- Library of Congress – https://www.loc.gov/free-to-use/
- National Gallery of Art – https://www.nga.gov/open-access-images.html
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art – https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/policies-and-documents/open-access
- The Art Institute of Chicago – https://www.artic.edu/open-access/open-access-images
- New York Public Library Digital Collections – https://digitalcollections.nypl.org
- Harvard Art Museums – https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections
- Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History – https://collections.peabody.yale.edu/search/
- Yale University Art Gallery – https://artgallery.yale.edu/using-collection
- David Rumsey Map Collection (Stanford) – https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/
- Project Apollo (Lunar Mission) – https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/
- NASA images (with further links to Flickr) – https://www.nasa.gov/image-galleries/
- The Walters Museum of Art – https://art.thewalters.org
- The Morgan Museum and Library – https://www.themorgan.org/collection
- Cleveland Museum of Art – https://www.clevelandart.org/open-access
- St. Lous Art Museum – https://www.slam.org/public-domain-and-open-access/
- Denver Art Museum – https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/search/collections
Outside US
- RUKS STUDIO from the Rijksmuseum – https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio
- Victoria & Albert – https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections
- Belvedere – https://www.belvedere.at/en/open-content
- Birmingham Museums Trust – https://dams.birminghammuseums.org.uk/asset-bank/action/viewDefaultHome?browseType=folders
- Kunstmuseum Basel – https://kunstmuseumbasel.ch/en/collection/collectiononline
- The British Library (via Flickr) – https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/albums
- The British Museum – https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection
- Wellcome Collection (health, medicine and human experience) – https://wellcomecollection.org/search/images
- Canadian Museum of History – https://www.historymuseum.ca/collections/
- Royal Ontario Museum – https://www.rom.on.ca/en/collections-research/online-collections
To Research
- https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g6-Activities-c49-t28-Africa.html
- https://art.afe.easia.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/museums/search.cgi
- https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g2-Activities-c49-t28-Asia.html
- https://theartwolf.com/art-museums/museums-location-asia/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Art_museums_and_galleries_in_Oceania
- https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g13-Activities-c49-t28-South_America.html
- https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g291958-Activities-c49-Central_America.html
Search Engines
Use with caution. All of these rely on the self reporting of the uploader and frequently destroy proper licensing and provenance information.
- Creative Commons – https://search.creativecommons.org
- Museo (Open Source project that searches some of these repositories)
- (The 2024 announced “Public Works” is essentially a dime bag for the for-profit search engine Cosmos with the source material stolen from Flickr commons. It destroys provenance information and licensing information. Can’t recommend it, so won’t link to it.)