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Last Updated: 2-Jun-2015

These sites are sources of high-quality, well-cataloged images.

The use of digital images is often subject to copyright and/or licensing restrictions. Consult each site's information on rights and reproductions--especially if you plan to use an image in a publication. It is equally important that you cite images properly.  See the "Citing images" section of this guide.

Art images

ARTstor

A very large subscription-based database; offers images pertaining to the arts and related disciplines: anthropology, archaeology, history, etc. The images are of high resolution and generally good quality and are always accompanied by descriptive metadata. Searching is by keyword and can be limited by date, location, and medium, or specific collection. Images can be resized, saved, and downloaded.

ARTstor

VRC Imagebase

Stanford's Visual Resources Center Imagebase contains over 90,000 primarily art historical images. In addition to the quick search box, you can explore by browsing collections that have been sorted by department, faculty name, medium, country, and style.

VRC Imagebase

Archives of American Art Image Gallery

A subset of the Archives of American Art's Collections Online, the images collection includes photographic images of artists, exhibition installations, manuscripts, and events.

Archives of American Art Image Gallery

Getty Search Gateway

The Getty Search Gateway allows users to search across several of the Getty repositories, including collections databases, library catalogs, collection inventories, and archival finding aids. To limit your search to records with images, click "Only records with images" to the right of the search box or restrict your search to the Open Content Images collection.

Getty Search Gateway

Web Gallery of Art

Hosted in Hungary, the Web Gallery of Art is a searchable database of European fine arts from 11th to 19th centuries. The images are primarily taken from textual sources.

Web Gallery of Art

Bildindex

Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur contains approximately two million photographic reproductions of art and monuments in Germany and the rest of Europe. It is based on Marburger Index, a microfiche compilation of 1.4 million images.

Bildindex

WorldImages

Maintained by San Jose State University, the WorldImages database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project.  It contains approximately 100,000 images, is global in coverage, and includes all areas of visual imagery.

WorldImages

Historical images

Image Gallery

The Image Gallery provides access to various digital collections owned by the Stanford Libraries, including the David Rumsey Collection (maps), the Douglas Menuez Photography Collection, the Herbert Matter Photograph Collection, Medieval Manuscript Fragments, the Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, and the The Reid W. Dennis Collection of California Lithographs.

Image Gallery

Luna Insight Collections

Luna Insight is a web interface that can be used to search across multiple digital collections. At Stanford, Luna provides access to the following collections: Douglas Menuez Photography Collection, Maps of Africa, Stanford Geological Survey, and Stanford Historical Photos.

Luna Insight Collections

Calisphere

This site is powered by the California Digital Library and draws from the its online collections of photographs, maps, and other primary sources relating to California culture and history.  See also the Online Archive of California, where you can search the same images in the context of the archival collections from which they have been drawn.

Calisphere

American Memory

This historical collection is the Library of Congress's key contribution to the National Digital Library. The site offers various aspects of the collection, including digital reproductions, a finding aid in the form of a catalog or register, and other accompaniments. It includes collections of photographs, recorded sound, motion pictures, and manuscripts; more materials are becoming available over time.  After searching the collections, click on Gallery View to see the image results.

American Memory

NYPL Digital Gallery

The New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery provides access to over 800,000 images digitized from the Library's holdings of manuscripts, posters, photographs, prints, maps, etc. Images can be browsed from within their contextual collections (e.g., After Columbus: Four Hundred Years of Native American Portraiture; “The Pageant of America” Photograph Archive) or via basic and advanced keyword search interfaces.

NYPL Digital Gallery

Smithsonian Collections Search Center

This Smithsonian meta-search engine provides access to 7.98 million catalog records with 816,516 images, video and sound files, electronic journals, and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives & libraries.

Smithsonian Collections Search Center

News images

AP Images

AP Images is one of the world's largest collections of historical and contemporary imagery, with a 50 million-image print and negative archive. As an essential source of photographs and graphics for professional image buyers, AP Images strives to meet the needs of today's global customer through superior image quality, selection and service. Covers the major news events photographed from the 1840s to today.

AP Images

Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos is a cooperative that provides photographs to the press, publishers, advertising, television, galleries and museums across the world. The Magnum Photos library houses all the work produced by Magnum photographers and some special collections by non-members. There are approximately one million photographs in both print and transparency in the physical library, with over 500,000 images available online. These images may be licensed for editorial and commercial use; they are not specifically licensed for academic use.  All images are under copyright.

Magnum Photos

Getty Images Editorial Photos

Getty Images licenses photography and other images for commercial and non-commercial use. The Editorial Images component of the site includes news and archival collections. These collections are fully searchable for free but require payment for use.

Getty Images Editorial Photos

Science images

Luna Insight Collections

Luna Insight is a web interface that can be used to search across multiple digital collections. At Stanford, Luna provides access to the following collections: Douglas Menuez Photography Collection, Maps of Africa, Stanford Geological Survey, and Stanford Historical Photos.

Luna Insight Collections

U.S. National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery

A collection of images, video, and audio relating to the National Science Foundation's research in science and engineering

U.S. National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery

U.S. Government Photos and Images

This collection is strong in science and technology coverage, but it also supplies links to some historical, arts, and cultural photos.

U.S. Government Photos and Images

MD Consult

MD consult provides access to textbooks, electronic journals, practice guidelines, drug information, and patient education handouts. It also provides access to 50,000 medical images. To search the images only, change the Search drop-down menu from "All Sections" to "Images."

MD Consult

NOAA Photo Library

A collection of downloadable public domain photos, maps, and illustrations produced by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

NOAA Photo Library

Earth Science World Image Bank

Photographers who have submitted images to the Earth Science World Image Bank acknowledge that the photos displayed here are acceptable for use in non-commercial venues. Some images are available at a high-resolution free of charge for non-commercial purposes as well. A project of the American Geosciences Institute, the image bank also covers related topics such as weather, dinosaurs, archaeology, lakes and landscapes. 

Earth Science World Image Bank

Optics ImageBank

This subset of the Optics InfoBase contains over 200,000 images from the Optical Society of America journal articles. Many are cross-linked to related images. Images can be browsed and searched by keyword and can be exported to PowerPoint and in PDF format for educational purposes. Enhanced interactive equations can also be exported. 

Optics ImageBank

Citing images

Several universities provide excellent guides to citing images in papers and presentations. One standout:

Colgate University's Visual Resources Library (MLA, Chicago, APA)

ARTstor also provides its own guidelines.

In general, the following details are necessary for any image citation, no matter which citation style you choose:

* The title of the image, if applicable. For example, this could be the title of the artwork or, if it's a media image, the original caption.
* The name of the image's creator.
* The repository of the image. This is the institution that owns the original: the museum, the library, the archive, the individual, etc.
* The source. This could be a database such as ARTstor, a Web site, a book, etc.
* The date you accessed the image. This is most important for Web sources, which can be quite ephemeral.

Copyright resources

The Art & Architecture Library's Visual Resources Center uses the Image Collection Guidelines published by the Visual Resources Association and the Provost's yearly Copyright Reminder as its primary copyright guidelines.

Other Copyright Resources:

* Copy Photography Computator, created by A. Kohl.
* Copyright and Art Issues, Christine L. Sundt, University of Oregon
* Intellectual Property and the Arts, moderated by the College Art Association
* Fair Use, the Stanford Libraries' website on Fair Use
* Use the VRA 's Digital Image Rights Computator (DIRC) to determine the intellectual property rights status of the image you intend to use.