LibGuides: Freely Available Online Resources: Image Databases

Image Databases

Art in the Christian Tradition
A freely available, regularly updated visual image internet resource. Designed for scholars, students, pastors, and religious educators, all of the images may be used for educational and/or religious non-profit purposes. - From the Vanderbilt Divinity Library
Art Institute of Chicago images (Christianity)
The Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to 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 this website.

ARTSTOR: Open Access to Public Collections
~1.3 million freely accessible images, videos, documents, and audio files from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials, plus hundreds of thousands of open access images from partner museums.
About Public Access to ARTSTOR | (via ARTSTOR blog) More than 1 million images now publicly available

British Library: Digitised Manuscripts
"Use this website to view digitised copies of manuscripts and archives in the British Library’s collections, with descriptions of their contents. Explore the Library's latest major acquisition, the St Cuthbert Gospel. Some other highlights include the Harley Golden Gospels, Beowulf, the Silos Apocalypse, Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebook, the Petit Livre d’Amour and the Golf Book."
Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative
A repository of digital resources contributed by American Theological Library Association and Association of Theological Schools member libraries made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation. This collection is now part of the Atla Digital Library.

Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
Cuneiform inscriptions dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. Data set consists of text and image, combining document transliterations, text glossaries and digitized originals and photo archives of cuneiform. A joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oxford, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Terms of Use: https://cdli.ucla.edu/?q=terms-of-use Support for the project has been generously provided by the Mellon Foundation, the NSF, the NEH, the IMLS, and by the MPS, Oxford and UCLA; network services are from UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities.

Digital Scriptorium
An image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research
Everett Ferguson Photo Collection (Early Christianity)
"Images include those of early Christian churches, basilicas and cathedrals as well as images of modern and ancient cities and archaeological sites in Israel, Turkey, Greece, ancient Rome, and throughout Europe. The objects photographed are from exhibits at the British Museum, the Ashmolean, the Louvre and other prominent museums of Europe and the Mediterranean countries."
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"Dr. Ferguson is former president of the North American Patristics Society and a member of the councils of the American Society of Church History and the Association Internationale D’Etudes Partistiques."
Getty Images
The Getty collection of images are now available for embedding for free. Good idea to read Brandom's article – especially the part about link rot – prior to checking out the site.

Index of Medieval Art
Largest database of medieval art in existence with full-text records for over 23,000 works of art dating from early apostolic times to A.D. 1400. Each work, depending on the medium can have up to fifty different classification fields, including data such as location/ownership, date, school, style, etc. The subject matter of each work is classified under one or more of the 27,165 subject terms developed over eighty-five years by the Index and a full-text description accompanies each work. Access to the Index of Medieval Art Database Will Become Free on July 1, 2023

Intellectual Property Standards and Guidelines | The College Art Association
Image sources and rights clearance agencies
International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA)
"The historical images in the International Mission Photography Archive come from Protestant and Catholic missionary collections held at a number of centers in Britain, Europe, and North America." Part of the USC Digital Library
Internet Archive Book Images (Public Domain)
The Internet Archive processed more than 2 million volumes from its digital archive, compiling more than 14 million high resolution images spanning nearly every topic imaginable. Each image includes detailed descriptions, including the subject tags of the book it came from and the text immediately surrounding it on the page. The latter is especially powerful, as it allows to keyword search 500 years of images, instantly accessing particular topics or themes.
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Click here for information
Metropolitan Museum: The Collection Online, digital images
"The Metropolitan Museum of Art has released a vast archive of 400,000 (mostly) hi-resolution digital images online that you can download and use for non-commercial purposes. From a 12-megapixel scan of Rembrandt's 1660 self-portrait to over 18,000 photos spanning almost two centuries." --Christopher Jobson
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https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/policies-and-documents/image-resources
Metropolitan Museum Timeline of Art History
A chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated by the Metropolitan Museum's collection made possible by the Heilbrunn Foundation, New Tamarind Foundation, and Zodiac Fund
Pitts Theology Library Digital Image Archive
The Digital Image Archive (DIA) presents more than 65,000 images of biblical illustrations, portraits of religious leaders, printers' devices, engravings of church buildings, and other theological topics. They are available for teaching, research, and other non-commercial purposes. For a modest fee, the library will grant permission for use in commercial publications and will supply the publisher with high resolution .tif files for download.
US National Archives GIFs
The official Giphy channel for the National Archives. For the official source of information about the National Archives, please visit https://www.archives.gov. To learn more about our social media policies, visit https://www.archives.gov/social-media/policies/.
World Digital Library: Religion
The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures. Item types include books, journals, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, newspapers, prints and photographs, and sound recordings.
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WDL is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world.
Yale Divinity Library Digital Collections
A faculty-library initiative from Yale University Divinity School Library that provides digital resources for teaching and research

Creative Commons Licensed Images

Creative Commons-licensed Images

Google Image Search allows filtering by Creative Commons (CC) license.

What is Creative Commons?

"Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs."