Open Educational Resources (OER)

Getty Search Gateway & Getty Museum's Collection:  The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital 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.  There are currently 10,000 images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute available through the Open Content Program. These include paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, antiquities, sculpture, decorative arts, artists' sketchbooks, watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, and 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks. Over time, images from the Getty Conservation Institute will be added, as well as more images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute.

National Gallery of Art Images (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. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 32,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.

To get started enter a search term in the Quick Search box located in the upper right-hand corner of this page or browse the regularly updated featured-image collections prepared by Gallery staff.

For detailed information about the National Gallery of Art, including location and hours, please visit the Gallery’s website at www.nga.gov

Many of the open access images have been digitized with the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The Index of American Design digitization project is funded in part by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts.

French Revolution Digital Archive images are composed of high-resolution digital images of approximately 12,000 individual visual items, primarily prints, but also illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects, which display aspects of the Revolution. These materials were selected from across the BnF’s departments, and include thousands of images for the important collections entitled Hennin and De Vinck. Detailed metadata exists for the images, so that researchers can search by artist, subject, genre, and place.

The FRDA provides access to the most complete searchable digital archive of French Revolution images available. Images de la Révolution française is a benchmark image-base undertaken by the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the occasion of the Revolution’s bicentennial in 1989. It aimed to “allow the reader to explore the relationships, articulations and confrontations between the ideas of the Revolution and their metaphorical embodiment, the constant cross-fertilization of ideology and make-believe…” For this project the BnF created over 38,000 separate views of over 14, 000 individual images, 

Pexels provides high-quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.  All photos are nicely tagged, searchable, and also easy to discover through the Pexel discovery pages.  There are currently around 25,000 free stock photos available, and every month at least 3,000 new high resolution photos will be added. All photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by Pexel users or sourced from free image websites. Pexels makes sure all published pictures are high-quality and licensed under CC0. 

The British Museum collection database is a growing collection of digitized objects from the museum's collection.  There are already over four-million objects represented digitally, and more objects, records, and images are added each week!  Most images are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.  

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (OASC) Initiative collection provides access to more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works in the Museum's collection.  These images 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. 

The Museum's OASC initiative provides license- and cost-free access to images of artwork in the collection that the Museum believes to be in the public domain and free of other known restrictions for scholarly use in any media which the Museum has identified as  on the site.  Access to OASC images is direct from the Collection section of the website.  OASC greatly expands the amount of the Museum's images freely available for scholarly use, and facilitates direct access via the Museum's website.

British Library Images are available from British Library, which has released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitized by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to the Library,  who then released them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.

Google Art Project provides access to 40,000 works of art from over 250 museums.

Rijksmuseum Digitized Image Collection from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam offers free access to over 130,000 objects in their digital collection.  Users are able to create a free account in order to download high-resolution images that can be zoomed in on, shared, added to a personal collection, or manipulated copyright-free.      

Wellcome Images is one of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.

All images are available on demand in digital form. Search online or use the expertise of our professional scientific and historical researchers.

This unrivaled collection contains historical images from the Wellcome Library collections, Tibetan Buddhist paintings, ancient Sanskrit manuscripts written on palm leaves, beautifully illuminated Persian books and much more.

The Biomedical Collection holds over 40 000 high-quality images from the clinical and biomedical sciences. Selected from the UK's leading teaching hospitals and research institutions, it covers disease, surgery, general healthcare, sciences from genetics to neuroscience including the full range of imaging techniques.

Wellcome Images is one of the Wellcome Library's major visual collections. Part of Wellcome Collection, a major new ः30 million public venue developed by the Wellcome Trust, the Library has over 750 000 books and journals, an extensive range of manuscripts, archives and films, and more than 250 000 paintings, prints and drawings.

Nappy is a repository that hosts "Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free. For commercial and personal use."  The Nappy License adopts the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, so users can download these photos, modify them, share them, distribute them, or use them for either commercial or educational (any!) use for free. Nappy encourages users to share freely in order to help improve the representation of black and brown people in media. Nappy also encourages users to give credit to the photographer when using their works; not because it's required, but because it's a good things to give credit.  

The Public Domain Review is an online journal that celebrates, organizes, and makes available materials that have passed into the Public Domain and can be freely used, modified, and shared.  They curate and provide access to a collection of Public Domain Images among other collections.