Art/Art History: Online Image Banks

Artsy is the largest online collection of contemporary art, featuring 350,000 images of art, architecture, and design by 50,000 artists. Most images are freely downloadable for educational use.

AICT is a free-use image resource for the educational community, which covers Ancient art through the 20th century and non-Western art. Perform specific searches or browse works by Title or Medium. The Textbook Concordance lists the source texts cited with each illustration. Good r

Contains duplicates and variants of more than three-quarters of the 302 images in Abbott’s Changing New York Project.

Provides access to "millions of items from a range of Europe's leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums."

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has launched the Rijks Studio, a new online presentation of 125,000 works in its collection. “Rijks Studio invites members of the public to create their own masterpieces by downloading images of artworks or details of artworks in the collection and using them in a creative way. The ultra high-resolution images of works, both famous and less well-known, can be freely downloaded, zoomed in on, shared, added to personal ‘studios’, or manipulated copyright-free."

Searchable gateway of the Smithsonian research collections of libraries, archives, photographs, 600,000 records comprising the National Inventory of American Painting and Sculpture databases, and specialized research bibliographies.

The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods (1150-1800), currently containing over 33,300 reproductions. Commentaries on pictures, biographies of artists are available.

The Digital Public Library of America is a large cultural heritage site that provides books, images, historic records, and audiovisual materials for public use.

Flickr Commons was launched in January of 2008, as a pilot project with the Library of Congress. You can find publicly-held photographic collections via the Commons, and even help to catalog images.

180,000 digitized photos, postcards, maps, and other images freely available online and in the public domain. The NYPL has made the decision to treat these public-domain images as public intellectual property that can be reused by members of the public in any way they want. (For the New York Public Library’s Press Release on promoting transformative use of their materials, click here.)

A database of over 31 million freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

An excellent resource for trends in global contemporary photography, LensCulture was founded in 2004 by Jim Casper. The site covers global photography across many differing points of view, including photojournalism, street photography, and documentary photography.

Browse the large collection of prints and photographs available through the Library of Congress by searching their online catalog, or selecting collection topics on the home page.

170,000 iconic pictures of America in the era of the Great Depression and WWII (1935-1945) housed in the Library of Congress, released by Yale and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Searchable by County map.