Image Sites and Collections
The British Museum
Most images that are © The Trustees of the British Museum are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
The Brooklyn Museum
Allows many of its images to be used free of charge for educational purposes. It was the first art museum to adopt a Creative Commons License, in 2004, allowing any non-commercial copying of any image in which the museum holds the copyright.
Getty Museum
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.
Harvard Art Museums
The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images on the site for personal, noncommercial use for educational or scholarly purposes. Please note that some of the content of the site is protected by third party rights. For example, large images of some objects are not available because of restrictions from copyright holders.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
For LACMA Image Library, images of works in the public domain are available at high resolution, free of charge, and without restriction. Images that are deemed “Protected Content” have restrictions. For the terms of use, click here.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Browse more than 406,000 hi-res images of public-domain works in The Met collection that can be downloaded, shared, and remixed without restriction.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
NGA Open Access Images
Open Access image downloads are now available directly from the object pages located on this website. Over 50,000 images are available for download, and we will continue to add more images for free access as more works are photographed and as works of art enter the public domain.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
The Rijksmuseum has made images from its “basic collection” – a little over 103,000 objects – available under a Creative Commons BY 3.0 license which allows you to: share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work), remix (to adapt the work), and to make commercial use of the work. These images may be used for publishing as long as the museum receives proper attribution.
Smithsonian Open Access
Download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 3.9 million 2D and 3D digital items from the collections. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
The Walters Art Museum
All photography on the website of The Walters Art Museum is governed by Creative Commons Licensing and can be used without cost or specific permission. Artworks in the photographs are in the public domain due to age. The photographs of two-dimensional objects have also been released into the public domain. Photographs of three-dimensional objects and all descriptions have been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License. Illuminated manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum are available for download from Flickr.