Listing of websites with images under a permissive license
Check each website for information on their license. It ranges from super permissives to only a few items under a free-to-reuse license. For instance, The Art Institute of Chicago offer free, unrestricted use of over 50,000 images of works in the collection believed to be in the public domain or to which the museum otherwise waives any copyright it might have. Such images are made available under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation and the Terms and Conditions of their website.
The collection contains stock photos, historical images, clip art, music, and video. Creative Commons offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations. CC has no control over the results that are returned, so you should always verify that the work is actually under a CC license. Do not assume that the results displayed in your search are under a CC license.
Thousands of freely licensed digital books, artworks, photos and images of historical library materials and museum objects. If an image is not marked ‘rights-managed’ then it is free to use at both high and low resolution.
Free stock photos & videos shared by talented creators. All photos on Pexels are free for personal and commercial purposes. Attribution is not required.
Beautiful,free photos. All photos can be used free for commercial or noncommercial purposes. Attribution is not required, but is appreciated.
Paris Musées | France
Le Site parismuseescollections.paris.fr permet aux utilisateurs de consulter les œuvres issues des collections des musées de la Ville de Paris. L'ensemble des images présentes sur le portail, compte tenu du statut des œuvres représentées et des droits d'auteur attachées à l'Image, sont soit placées sous licence Creative Commons, soit demeurent « Tous droits réservés » à leurs auteurs ou aux ayants-droit des auteurs. L’internaute sera autorisé ou non à faire usage des images selon les différents cas.
By default images cannot be re-used. Exceptions apply, see Conditions for Use of Images. They have a Search tool, Atlas
Digitalt Museum | Norway, Sweden
Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark) | Copenhagen, Denmark
The Rijksmuseum and api
The Rijksmuseum OAI API Collection is a set of more than 110,000 descriptions of objects (metadata) and digital images from the Rijksmuseum collection. Images can be downloaded or shared. Account creation is required. Most are under a Creative Commons BY 3.0 licence (allowing sharing, remixing and commercial use).
Europeana | Netherlands
Brighton Museums | UK
The published images and data from our collections are made available under a BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons licence.
The British Museum | London UK
Natural History Museum | London, UK
Imperial War Museum | London, UK
Museum of New Zealand. Te Papa | Wellington, New Zealand
800,000 artworks, taonga, photographs, collection objects, and botanical and zoological specimens from Te Papa’s collections.
National Museum Australia | Canberra, Australia
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Image Resources
The Museum has implemented Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC). Through OASC, artworks in the Collection section of the website which the Museum believes to be in the public domain and free of other known restrictions have been identified by an icon, OASC. On February 7, 2017, The Metropolitan Museum of Art implemented a new policy known as Open Access, which makes images of artworks it believes to be in the public domain widely and freely available for unrestricted use, and at no cost, in accordance with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation and the Terms and Conditions of this website. Check their Open Data Policy
The J. Paul Getty Museum Open Content Program
Over 99,000 images are available for download. 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.
Thousands of artworks in the museum’s wide-ranging collection—from our world-renowned icons to lesser-known gems from every corner of the globe—as well as our books, writings, reference materials, and other resources.
Thousands of artworks, from around the world and across the centuries. Get detailed information about the artworks, including conservation and exhibition histories. Download high quality digital images. Search, tag and create an online art collection. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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 53,000 open access digital images up to 4000 pixels on the long dimension are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration. Quick access with collection-search
25,000 artworks
The Cleveland Museum of Art Image Collections
Also accessible from the Internet Archive
Los Angeles County Museum of Art | Los Angeles, CA
Largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection of more than 142,000 objects that illuminate 6,000 years of artistic expression across the globe. Committed to showcasing a multitude of art histories, LACMA exhibits and interprets works of art from new and unexpected points of view that are informed by the region’s rich cultural heritage and diverse population.
180,000 artworks. The Gallery organizes exhibitions and educational programs to offer enjoyment and encourage inquiry, while building and maintaining its collections in trust for future generations.
The Yale Center for British Art
The Yale Center for British Art is a museum that houses the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. Presented to the university by Paul Mellon (Yale College, Class of 1929), the collection reflects the development of British art and culture from the fifteenth century to the present.
More than 2,000 works of art in the Barnes Foundation’s collection are available to the public. Each work in the Barnes Online Collection is assigned a “rights statement” that helps communicate their best assessment of the copyright status of the work
The Museum's entire permanent collection (over 20,000 objects) is searchable online and over half of the entries are accompanied by images in the online database.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum | Boston, MA
The Jewish Museum | New York, NY
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art | New York, NY
More than 89,000 works are currently available online.
Minneapolis Institute of Art | Minneapolis, MN
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts | Richmond, VA
Search over 16 million records of museum objects, archives and library materials including more than 5.1 million online images, audio & videos and blog posts.
openbeelden | Netherlands
Open Images is an open media platform that offers online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse.
DigitalNZ | New Zealand
Library of Congress. Print and Photographs Online Catalog and collections
The collections include photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings. The nature of historical archival collections means that copyright or other information about restrictions may be difficult or even impossible to determine. Whenever possible, the Library provides information about copyright owners and other restrictions in the catalog records or other texts that accompany collections. The Library provides such information as a service to aid patrons in determining the appropriate use of an item, but that determination ultimately rests with the user.
Images, Videos, and Audios, many of which are from the Netherlands. Access to the material on Open Images is provided under the Creative Commons licensing model. Licenses and requirements are included with each audiovisual entry.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Access to print, images, and audio-visual collections from the Library of Congress.
New York Public Library -- Digital Gallery and digitalcollections
NYPL Digital Gallery provides free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.
The internationally recognized WorldImages database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It has just been selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in its historic collection of Internet materials. It contains approximately 100,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery.
Fine Arts Museums of San Fransisco | San Fransisco
Largest public arts institution in the City of San Francisco and one of the largest art museums in the United States.
GRANGER is an image licensing service that provides historical images for commercial and editorial use. We maintain an extensive, easily-searchable online image archive and provide a variety of research and image modification services.
NASA Images and Images from NASA
Images, audio, video, and computer files used in the rendition of 3-dimensional models, such as texture maps and polygon data in any format - generally are not copyrighted. You may use this material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits, computer graphical simulations and Internet Web pages. This general permission extends to personal Web pages. NASA has extensive image and video galleries online, including historic images, current missions, astronomy pictures, and ways to search for NASA images.
U.S. Department of Agriculture Image Gallery
All images are in the public domain and may be used for any purpose. However, don’t use them to infer or imply USDA/ARS endorsement of any product, service, or position.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
The Images collection is a selection of digital still images which are the very best visual representation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service mission - "working with others to conserve, protect and enhance fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people". Most selected images, historical artifacts, audio clips, publications, and video, are in the public domain. Those not in the public domain are intended for personal, private use.
USDA Agricultural Research Archive
Typically scans from old books. The resolution is super high, but it is a scan and it can show on the photo.
Illustrations from old books. Old illustrations of plants and birds. Example
creativecommons search and oldsearch
images google,select tools and usage rights = creative commons. There are images that you would not expect to be available under that license, for instance Ansel Adams
Flickr Commons and flickr tagged as creative commons
A number of museums make images from their collections available via Flickr Commons.
Generative Art Guide: Examples, Software and Tools to Make Algorithm Art
The processing community is perhaps the best source.
Creative Tools to Generate AI Art
Generating Modern Art using Generative Adversarial Network(GAN) on Spell
Artificial Art: How GANs are making machines creative
what you look like as a renaissance painting according to AI
Portraits of historical figures
thispersondoesnotexist.com -- Imagined by a GAN (generative adversarial network) StyleGAN2 (Dec 2019)