How to Find: Images - Discovery Seminar - In Praise of Shadows - Adams - Spring 2025 - Research Guides at Emory University Libraries

Databases

ARTstor
Curated collections of digital images and associated data for non-commercial, scholarly, non-profit, and educational use. Over 1 million images.
A&AePortal
The A&AePortal provides an digital environment in which to discover and interact with important art and architectural history scholarship. The database includes both books that are difficult to access in print and new releases and born-digital publications (i.e.,digital only) made available as eBooks exclusively on the A&AePortal

Websites

Google Art Project
Google Art Project is an online platform through which the public can access high-resolution images of artworks housed in the initiative's partner museums.
Getty Images
Find high resolution royalty-free images, editorial stock photos, vector art, video footage clips and stock music licensing at the richest image search photo library.
Artsy
Artsy features the world’s leading galleries, museum collections, foundations, artist estates, art fairs, and benefit auctions, all in one place. Our growing database of 300,000 images of art, architecture, and design by 40,000 artists spans historical, modern, and contemporary works, and includes the largest online database of contemporary art. Artsy is used by art lovers, museum-goers, patrons, collectors, students, and educators to discover, learn about, and collect art.
FATCAP
FatCap is the ultimate graffiti and street-art resource and aims to give an exhaustive snapshot of the street-art culture all over the world.

Museums and Libraries: United States

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially "the Met", is located in New York City and is the largest art museum in the United States, and among the most visited art museums in the world.
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has an extraordinary collection of modern and contemporary art.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is the fourth largest museum in the United States. It contains more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas.
Smithsonian
Founded in 1846, the Smithsonian is the world's largest museum, education, and research complex, consisting of 19 museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park, and nine research facilities.
J. Paul Getty Museum
The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles houses European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, and photography from its beginnings to the present, gathered internationally.
Harvard Art Museums
Three museums with a global collection of objects in all media from antiquity to the present.
New York Public Library
Explore 687,035 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections.
Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs online catalog.

Finding Free Images and Audio

Always assume that an image, video, or audio file posted on the web can't be used without permission of the creator unless it has a license that states otherwise.

To find images available through Creative Commons and other licenses:

You can use images from websites dedicated to making images available for use, such as The Noun Project, Pexels, Pixabay, or Unsplash.
You can use images in the public domain, from art collections and digitized content. Examples include:
- The Met Collection
  - View thousands of public domain artworks that are part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collections.
- HathiTrust Digital Library
  - HathiTrust is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via the Google Books project and Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.
You can utilize search engines that allow filtering by license, including:
- Creative Commons Search
  - CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone.
- Flickr Creative Commons images
  - Many Flickr users have licensed their work under creative commons.
- Wikimedia Commons
  - Crowdsourced collection of Creative Commons media files.
- Google Advanced Image Search
  - For Google, scroll down to the last option, "usage rights", and choose the license that best suits your project.

To find audio available through Creative Commons and other licenses:

You can use audio from websites where creators have posted their work for others to use, like Free Music Archive, dig.ccMixter, or FreeSound. Be sure to check the specific license requirements of the file you want to use!