Research Guides: Images for Designers and Art Researchers: Finding Images

Recommended Image Sources

Artstor This link opens in a new window
Artstor is a digital library including high-quality images for use to enhance scholarship and teaching from a wide variety of contributors around the world.
The Artstor website will be retired and all users will be redirected to JSTOR on August 1, 2024. Get started with Artstor on JSTOR now at: https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.newschool.edu/artstor

Flickr
User-created content and content contributed by institutions such as the Library of Congress and the Brooklyn Museum: mostly current and recent photographs.
Getty Images
Huge stock photography and illustrations database. Images can be limited by people, location, concept, subject or composition.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
NYPL Digital Collections
Photographs, prints, maps, manuscripts and book pages digitized from NYPL Collections.

Stylus This link opens in a new window
Stylus provides inspirational and informative research and relates it to prevailing consumer trends, acting as a catalyst to push the design industries to new levels.

Digital Image Collections

From Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs)

British Library Images Online
Images Online is the Picture library of the British Library, the national library of the United Kingdom.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.
Europeana
The Europeana online portal was launched in 2008 and provides access to over 19 million objects from European libraries, museums, archives, galleries, and audiovisual collections. More than 1,500 heritage institutions contribute cultural content. Objects relate to science, media and art and are available in different formats (text, images, audio/video, etc.) and in every European language.

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. Recent articles are generally not available. JSTOR now includes access to the Artstor collection. Artstor is an extensive image resource for educational and scholarly use . Including high-quality images and visual media from top museums, archives, scholars, artists, and contributors around the world.

Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online
The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) contains catalog records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress.
Media History Project
The Media History Digital Library is a non-profit initiative, led by Eric Hoyt at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, dedicated to digitizing historic books and magazines about film, broadcasting, and recorded sound for broad public access.
Memory of the Netherlands
Images from Dutch history from the national library of The Netherlands.
Photogrammar
Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).

Smithsonian Collections Search Center This link opens in a new window
The Smithsonian Collections Search Center is an online catalog containing most of Smithsonian major collections from our museums, archives, libraries, and research units. There are 7.9 million catalog records relating to areas for Art & Design, History & Culture, and Science & Technology with 819,800 images, video clips, sound files, electronic journals and other resources.

Smithsonian Open Access
Download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

The New School Archives Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
The New School Archives Digital Collections presents images, text, audio and video from The New School Archives & Special Collections, home to primary source materials documenting the history of all divisions of The New School.

World Bank Photos (Flickr)
The World Bank has a distinctive collection of over 13,000 images that illustrate development through topics such as Agriculture, Education, Environment, Health, Trade and more.

More General Image Sources

Eastman Museum
Explore the George Eastman Museum's collections online. More than a quarter of a million objects from the photography, technology, and George Eastman Legacy collections are now searchable, and more of the museum's vast holdings will be added on an ongoing basis.
Noor
Since its establishment in 2007 as both a photo agency and foundation, the international roster of NOOR’s - an Arabic word meaning "light" - accomplished and award-winning member photographers have documented civil and political unrest, environmental issues, war, famine, and natural disasters throughout the globe: from Africa and the Middle East to the Americas.

Also check out Magazine and Newspaper Archives!

Creative Commons

Creative Commons helps you legally share your knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world. We unlock the full potential of the internet to drive a new era of development, growth and productivity. With a network of staff, board, and affiliates around the world, Creative Commons provides free, easy-to-use copyright licenses to make a simple and standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work–on conditions of your choice.

Creative Commons search
Search Europeana, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, and Rijksmuseum, for images that can be reused under a creative commons licensed.

Images for Designers and Art Researchers

Recommended Image Sources

Digital Image Collections

More General Image Sources

Creative Commons

Libraries, Collections, & Academic Services

University Resources

Colleges