Images & Information Literacy: Home

UC Berkeley: Art History Digital Humanties Projects

Yale University  Digital Art History Projects

Museums/Galleries

The Rijksmuseum offers high-res digital downloads free for non-commercial use. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio

Currier Museum of Art: A quick resource guide for fair use images here: http://currierartlibrary.wordpress.com/databases/image-collections/ 

NGA Images (National Gallery of Art in Washington DC) https://images.nga.gov/en/page/show_home_page.html

LACMA unrestricted images collection:
https://collections.lacma.org/

The Walters Art  Museum
http://art.thewalters.org/

The British Museum Free Non-Commercial Use Images: 
http://www.britishmuseum.org/join_in/using_digital_images/using_digital_images.aspx?asset_id=852454&objectId=581907&partId=1

Art Institute of Chicago Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Another great resource for digital images http://digital-libraries.saic.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/mqc

Getty Open Content Program: High resolution images of works from the Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute that are in the public domain and may be used freely.  http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/5400-images-from-getty-research-institutes-special-collections-now-available-as-open-content/

Universities

Brown University. The list is annotated and includes notes when images are freely available: https://sites.google.com/a/brown.edu/resources-in-art-and-architecture-on-the-web/image-resources/image-resources-vendors-museums-etc

University of Colorado, Boulder: http://cuart.colorado.edu/resources/vrc/find/ (scroll down to the "Find Images Elsewhere on the Web")

UCLA : You might also find some use in the Creative Commons, Open Content, & Public Domain images tab of my Image Resources research guide at: http://guides.library.ucla.edu/content.php?pid=126509&sid=4342604.

Yale Digital Commons has 250,000 images "without license." http://discover.odai.yale.edu/ydc/

General Resources

Artsy (public domain images): http://artsy.net/post/christine-downloading-images-on-artsy

CAA (College Art Association) is also keeping a list at http://www.collegeart.org/standards-and-guidelines/intellectual-property/image

Flickr Commons: almost everything is downloadable. http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Wikimedia Commons tries to aggregate a number of institutions' free content. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Web List of Contemporary Art Museums Worldwide 

One thing I always have hesitations about, in these lists we call "free" or "open" image sources, is that when I read the fine print on the museum sites there are often qualifications.  Even Creative Commons licenses depend on the uploader in fact having copyright ownership of what s/he is uploading.  There are Picasso paintings on Flickr with the photographer (not Picasso) giving an open access license.