Wikipedia:Public domain image resources

There are a number of sources of public domain images on the Web.

The presence of a resource on this list does not guarantee that all or any of the images in it are in the public domain. You are still responsible for checking the copyright status of images before you submit them to Wikipedia.

Please read the policy on image use and etiquette at: Wikipedia:Image use policy

See also:

• Wikipedia:Images with missing articles
• Wikipedia:Copyrights
• Image upload page for registered users

History

Historical images

• http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ammemhome.html Library of Congress American Memory site (Check copyright information for the separate items before deciding to use them!)
• http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/ - public domain images of American Political History
• http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ngillus.htm Images from The Newgate Calendar. Mostly crimes and criminals from the 18th century. Also other works at http://www.exclassics.com
• http://fromoldbooks.org/ Collection images scanned from various old books that are now in the public domain. Searchable. Used to be at http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/pictures/oldbooks/
• http://www.john-leech-archive.org.uk/ John Leech sketch archives 1841 until 1864 from Punch magazine The page states they are long out of copyright and that they are believed to be public domain.
• http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/ Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library's online collection of digital images. Most will be {PD-art}. 90,000 images from rare books and manuscripts, search by keyword.
• http://digitalgallery.nypl.org NewYork Public Library. Over 500,000 images scanned from books. Including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more. There is a per-image usage fee even for public domain images.

Specific periods

• World War II Poster Collection over 300 posters issued by U.S. Federal agencies
• Photos of the Great War many images of World War I, scanned in from public domain resources. Slight usage notice, which is probably compatible with GFDL (requires attribution and link, as does GFDL, requests e-mail notice of usage).
• The Heritage of the Great War has several colour pictures from World War I (likely all PD, since the effort taken to scan/reproduce them probably fails to qualify for being a derivative work).
• World's Armed Forces Forum (gallery for images taken from the French Ministry of Culture's website) hosts more colour images of World War I (likely all PD, since the effort taken to scan/reproduce them probably fails to qualify for being a derivative work).
• http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/ Child Labor in America 1908 - 1912 by Lewis W. Hine
• Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum Thousands of on-line, copyright free photographs of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Great Depression and the New Deal, and World War II.

People

• http://utopia.utexas.edu/project/portraits/ - A selection of portraits of historical figures
• http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/ - A collection of over 500 public domain images of American Political History
• http://www.sonoma.edu/psychology/psychart.htm Public domain drawings of famous psychologists. Some better than others.
• http://www.imf.org/external/np/adm/pictures/captions.htm Photos of the IMF.
• http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/daghome.html - more than 700 Daguerreotypes 1839 - 1864 (mostly portraits)
• http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vvhtml/vvhome.html Creative Americans 1932 - 1964, photographs by Carl Van Vechten; 1400 public domain portrait photos
• http://www.loc.gov/rr/print Portraits of famous people, Library of Congress (not all public domain; remember, anything prior to 1923 is, and post-1922 images on the site that are copyright free are indicated)
• http://www.generalsandbrevets.com - portraits of all the generals (+1,000) of the American Civil War.
• http://www.noelcollection.org/noel/noelimag.html - Noel Collection Image Bank asks for a backlink and non-commercial use but almost all are pre-1923 and so PD
• http://www.state.gov/ U.S. Department of State - good for pictures of politicians and diplomats, but check that images do not have an alternative copyright. If a copyright is indicated on a photo, graphic, or other material, permission to copy these materials must be obtained from the original source. For photos without captions or with only partial captions, hold your cursor over the photo to view the "alt tag" for any copyright information.

Art

• http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/contents.asp - Images of the works of more than 2,600 realist painters many in the public domain, check catalogue for dates of works and artists.
• http://www.pdfoto.com - Free for commercial use. 3D and Digital Art as well as public domain photos. All images are organized by category.
• http://www.wga.hu/index1.html - "a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture from 12th to mid-19th centuries"

Visual arts

Note: Accurate photographs of visual artworks lack expressive content and are automatically in the public domain once the painting's copyright has expired (which it has in the US if it was published before 1923). All other copyright notices can safely be ignored.

• The National Gallery, London(requires Java plugin for large versions)
• The National Portrait Gallery, London
• The Louvre
• http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/
• http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/
• http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/
• http://sunsite.dk/cgfa/

Music

• http://www.ibiblio.org/mutopia/

Logos and flags

• http://www.wpclipart.com/flags/index.html 436 flags, countries listed alphabetically, also US State flags, historical and others. All in PNG format.
• http://www.sodipodi.com/index.php3?section=clipart/flags&area=flags 376 (at last count) public-domain flags (many national, some regional) in SVG format. (Apparently no longer actively maintained, with expansion handed over to http://www.openclipart.org/cgi-bin/navigate/signs_and_symbols/flags )
• https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html CIA World Factbook

Postage stamps

Commons:Stamps/Public domain

General collections

• Large collection of valuable free stock photos
• Scans of art from pre-1922 books and various photos, free for any use
• Pointie.com - Free high resolution photos for commercial and personal use
• http://karenswhimsy.com/public-domain-images/ - Scans of engravings and other artwork from a personal collection of old books, magazines, and post cards. Updated regularly.
• http://www.wpclipart.com - Public Domain clipart optimized for use in word processors. Browsable via site treeview and thumbnail pages. Complete collection also downloadable from ibiblio.
• http://yotophoto.com - Free image search engine including public domain, Creative Commons and GFDL images. Currently indexing over 130,000 free images.
• http://www.burningwell.org - Repository of public domain photos.
• http://www.gutenberg.net/catalog/ - Project Gutenberg: 12,000+ books, only a few illustrated, but the number of illustrated books increases from week to week. There are thousands upon thousands of PD images to be had, with a wee bit of legwork and a modicum of serendipity.
• http://backgroundsarchive.com - Thousands of public domain images organized by category, color and brightness.
• http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/ - GIMP Archive: 32,000+ Royalty-free photos, organized by keyword.
• http://www.openclipart.org/ - This project is an archive of public domain clip art. The clip art is stored in the W3C scalable vector graphics (SVG) format.
• http://opendomain.blogspot.com/ - public domain images from various sources in one-a-day blog format.
• http://www.pixeleye.com Pixeleye.com - Pictures from the Montafon Valley. Collection of public domain photos organized by category.
• http://pdphoto.org/ - Large collection of mostly public domain photos. Read the license for each picture before use; also, model releases may not have been obtained for all photos.
• http://www.logodesignweb.com/stockphoto/ - Small but growing public domain stock photos released by photographer.
• http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/public/public_domain.htm - Scanned and colorised etchings claimed to be PD images.

If any page or image seems missing, replace http://www.sru.edu/depts/cisba/compsci/dailey in its URI with http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/

• http://www.brazilpostcard.com.br Old Postcards from Brazil
• http://www.wisegorilla.com/clipart.html - All kinds of clipart.
• http://www.freephotos.se/ - Small personal photographic collection dedicated to the public domain.
• http://www.mathpuzzle.com/loyd/ Images of pages of a 1914 book of puzzles
• http://www.angelfire.com/pa2/sacredspiral/ - Public Domain Pagan Clipart
• http://content.lib.washington.edu/costumehistweb/index.html - This collection includes 417 fashion plates from 1806-1914 from some of the leading fashion journals of the time.
• http://www.ready2move.be/pics/ - Belgian nightlife
• http://publicdomain.photopress-spain.com/ - Public Domain Spain Photo Gallery. Photo archive containing a collection of free, public domain images and photos of Spain.
• http://www.PublicDomainFootage.com/ - Public domain archival stock footage and newsreels.
• http://www.stockphotox.com/ - Stock Photo Xposure, all images on the site licensed under CC-By-2.5

Computer-generated public domain images

• http://www.pointie.com/free_photos/free_photos.htm - Free photos for commercial and personal use
• http://tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapbrowse-tbl US Census Bureau TIGER Mapping service
• http://woodshole.er.usgs.gov/mapit/ - Automatic public domain map generating program
• http://www.collectionscanada.ca/cin/index-e.html - Canadian Illustrated News, 1869-1883

Public domain image meta-resources

• http://www.wfu.edu/~tedforrl/imagcoll.html
• http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/links/clipart.html (a lengthy list of categorised links to other public domain image sources, many of those links don't work though)
• http://dmoz.org/Computers/Graphics/Clip_Art/Public_Domain/ (a list of links to sites with public domain clip art)
• http://www.graphicsngraphicdesign.com/freestockphotos-graphicdesigners/
• http://images.google.com - search for images on government sites; this still requires one to check the copyright status of each image.

Uncategorized links

• http://content.cdlib.org/search?style=oac-img;sort=title;relation=ark:/13030/kt5b69q5bc — Oakland Public Library. Note all are PD! The image detail page will state the status, PD images will be clearly marked "Public domain".
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain - Wikisource. Like Wikipedia, tends to be useful from time to time.

U.S. Government sites

• http://home.nps.gov/applications/hafe/hfc/npsphoto.cfm - National Park Service
• http://www.firstgov.gov/Topics/Graphics.shtml - A portal to US Government images and photos. "Most of these images and graphics are available for use in the public domain"
• http://memory.loc.gov/ - U.S. Library of Congress digital image archive. (Some images are still under copyright, so caveat emptor.)
• http://pictures.fws.gov/ - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pictures
• http://images.fws.gov/ - More U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service imagery
• http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/ - NOAA Photo Library
• http://images.usace.army.mil/main.html - United States Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library
• http://photolibrary.usap.gov/ - Antarctic Photo Library
• http://www.usda.gov/oc/photo/opchomea.htm - USDA Online Photography Center
• http://photogallery.nrcs.usda.gov/Index.asp - USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Photo Gallery
• http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/graphics/photos/ - USDA Agriculture Research Service Image gallery
• http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/nhcorg11.htm Department of the Navy - Naval Historical Center Photographic Section
• http://www.pgc.state.pa.us/pgc/cwp/view.asp?a=458&q=162298 Pennsylvania Game Commission Public Photo Gallery (Birds and Mammals)
• http://www.dodmedia.osd.mil/ - DoD Defense Visual Information Center (High-resolution US military imagery; use with {{PD-USGov-Military-DVIC}} license template.)
• http://www.defenselink.mil/multimedia/ - Current DoD publicly released image
• http://visualsonline.cancer.gov/ -Great resource for electron microscopy and histological images. Includes general biomedical and science-related images, cancer-specific scientific and patient care-related images, and portraits of directors and staff of the National Cancer Institute.
• http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/index.html History of Medicine at the National Library of Medicine. Most but not all of the exhibitions are PD. Clicking on "Metadata" near the bottom of the page will generate a popup window with information that includes Rights usage for each page.
• http://nationalatlas.gov Lots of .GIF image maps, such as Congressional District maps, all in the public domain.