Alinari Picture Imaging Photo Gallery

Provides access to over 3.5 million images available. Founded in 1852 in Florence, Italy, Fratelli Alinari is the oldest firm in continuous existence connected with photography. There are two sites, one commercial (100,000 images) and one for students and educators (50,000 images); both require subscriptions.

ArchNet Digital Library

Provides access to a repository of more than 600,000 architectural images and publications, with the emphasis on the structures, landscapes, and planning needs of Islamic societies.

Art Images for College Teaching (AICT)

Disseminates images of art and architectural works in the public domain on a free-access, free-use basis to all levels of the educational community, as well as to the public at large, as a personal, non-profit project of its author, art historian and visual resources curator Allan T. Kohl.

Art Institute of Chicago Collection

Provides access to almost 12,500 works of art from the permanent collection in a searchable database. Includes image and basic information about works of art representing all areas of the collection. More object records are added to this site on an ongoing basis.

Art Resource

Provides access to high quality images of works of painting, sculpture, architecture and the minor arts from most of the world’s major museums, monuments, and commercial archives, licensable for commercial use exclusively in North America.  Only the free web content is available.

Artcyclopedia

Provides access to a comprehensive index of every artist represented at hundreds of museum sites, image archives, and other online resources. This site has indexed over 2,300 art sites, and offers over 95,000 links to an estimated 180,000 artworks by 8,200 artists.

artnet

Provides access to over 2 million illustrated fine art auction records from more than 500 major auction houses. The database excludes works that fail to meet certain attribution and price criteria.

ARTstor

ARTstor is a non-profit initiative, founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields. ARTstor is an web-based digital library of quality images, associated image records, and software tools designed to enhance teaching, learning, and scholarship. The ARTstor Digital Library contains approximately 600,000 images from a wide range of cultures and time periods, including images of architecture, painting, prints, drawings, sculpture, decorative arts, design, and archeological and anthropological objects. It incorporates many images from leading museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago. ARTstor's Offline Image Viewer allows a portable means of organizing ARTstor images for presentation, incorporating images from other databases and local sources. It also allows for the management and integration of personal images into its slideshows.

ARTstor is licensed for use by students, faculty, researchers and library patrons at subscribing institutions. ARTstor can be accessed on-campus or off by faculty, staff and students after initial registration from any on-campus computer This is a resource available only for non-commercial, educational uses.

This is a licensed collection: use of large and high-resolution images is restricted to the AIC and SAIC Community.

askART

Provides access to a database containing over 100,000 artists. From its inception the focus was on American artists from the early 16th-Century through the present. However, in January of 2007 the database has expanded to include international artists' auction records.

Catalog of Art Museum Images Online (CAMIO)

OCLC’s CAMIO (Catalog of Art Museum Images Online) is a growing online collection documenting works of art from around the world, representing the collections of prominent museums. CAMIO highlights the creative output of cultures around the world, from prehistoric to contemporary times, and covering the complete range of expressive forms.

CAMIO is licensed for use by students, faculty, researchers and library patrons at subscribing institutions. Works of art may be used for educational and research purposes during the term of the subscription, if they are properly credited. Images may not be published or otherwise distributed.

This is a licensed collection: use of large and high-resolution images is restricted to the AIC and SAIC Community.

CARLI Digital Collections

Provides access to a growing repository established in 2006 for digital content licensed or created by the member libraries of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI).

This is a licensed collection: use of large and high-resolution images is restricted to the AIC and SAIC Community.

Catena: Digital Archive of Historic Gardens and Landscapes

Provides access to a searchable collection of historic and contemporary images maintained at the Bard Graduate Center, including plans, engravings, paintings, and photographs to make possible the teaching of landscape studies.

Christie’s Images

Provides searching a selection of fine art images online from current sales. Upon registration, professional image users may license and download images online.

City2000: The Comer Archive of Chicago in the Year 2000

Provides access to a record of life in Chicago in the Year 2000, when more than 2000 photographers spent 366 days canvassing the city and chronicling its people, places and personality. The photographers shot more than 500,000 frames and visited each of the city's neighborhoods. The resulting archive contains audio and video recordings as well as photographs.

Cleveland Museum of Art Collections

Provides access to more than 40,000 objects in the permanent collection. This database contains records for all of the objects in the collections, although currently just over half have images.

Digital Library Federation: Digital Collections Registry

Provides a gateway to the digital collections of DLF member institutions, which includes an array of digital collections from all subject areas--art to science, literature to home economics--and from all types of institutions such as museums, libraries, and historical societies. Advanced searching allows one to limit searches to images.

Euromuse.net

Provides a public access portal giving accurate information on major exhibitions in European museums. It provides all vital information in one place, updated continuously by host museums. Each museum's information is available in the native language and in English. The Resources page allows one to search works of art in the museum's digital catalogs or to browse the presentations of selected works.

Grove Art Online

Provides encyclopedic coverage of all aspects of fine and applied arts, architecture, and artists and architects biographies. The art image links finds pages of the Art Resource image database (over 90,000 images) and Bridgeman Art Library image database (over 100,000 images).

Harvard University Visual Information Access (VIA)

Provides access to a union catalog of visual resources at Harvard, focusing on artistic and cultural materials. VIA includes catalog records for objects or images owned, held or licensed by Harvard. Access to the catalog is open to the general public: all catalog records and thumbnail images are available to everyone.

International Council of Museums, Virtual Library Museums Pages (ICOM VLmp)

Provides for browsing or searching for museums around the world by the kinds of collections preserved. Selected archives, art galleries, and libraries are also represented in this directory. Hyperlinks to many of the museum sites allow access to images of their collections.

International Museum of Photography and Film, George Eastman House, Photography Collections Online

Provides access to a steadily growing digital image sampler and browsing resource for the vast photography holdings of George Eastman House. All images are available as downloadable low resolution files for private study. Because of its focus on photography, its international scope, and its public nature, though a private organization, this site can be considered the most important Web resource for online historical photographs.

JSTOR

Provides full-text access to the back issues of hundreds of scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. JSTOR has recently developed a way to search both JSTOR and ARTstor content simultaneously. Specifically, users have the opportunity to keyword search JSTOR article content, JSTOR image captions, and ARTstor image metadata. As subscribers to both ARTstor and JSTOR, a user can see ARTstor image thumbnails as well as the title, creator and date information in their search results.

This is a licensed collection: use of large and high-resolution images is restricted to the AIC and SAIC Community.

Library of Congress: American Memory

Provides free and open access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America.

Library of Congress: Prints & Photographs Online

Provides access through group or item records to more than 50% of the Division's holdings, as well as to some images found in other units of the Library of Congress. Many of the catalog records are accompanied by digital images--about one million digital images in all.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collections Online

Provides access to nearly 70,000 works of art from the museum’s permanent collection through images, curatorial writings and reference material.

Louvre Databases

Provides access to four online databases: Atlas, the Inventory of the Department of Prints and Drawings, La Fayette Database of American Art, and Joconde. Atlas allows the direct online consultation of 35,000 works of art exhibited in the Louvre. The online illustrated inventory of the Department of Prints and Drawings is an exhaustive catalog of the museum's 140,000 works on paper, by some 4,500 artists. La Fayette, a bilingual online catalog, presents more than 1,700 works produced by American artists that entered the national collections of France before 1940. Joconde, developed by the Direction des Musées de France, incorporates 120,000 descriptions of drawings, prints, and paintings from the 7th century to the present day, from the collections of over sixty French museums.

Madison Digital Image Database (MDID)

The Madison Digital Image Database instructional system is designed to create, review and project Internet-based groups of digitized images related to coursework or lectures. See MacLean Visual Resource Center for instructions and login.

The Madison Digital Image Database is an online image database and instructional system designed to create and show Internet-based lectures using digitized images. The system permits instructors to remotely generate Slideshows, which can be annotated, placed online for student study, or archived for testing or future use. The MDID's ImageViewer allows creation of portable classroom and lecture hall presentations in the place of PowerPoint. It allows for the management and integration of personal images into its Slideshows.

This is a restricted collection: use of large and high-resolution images is restricted to the AIC and SAIC Community.

Metropolitan Museum of Art Collections

Provides access to about 6,500 objects--highlights from each of the Museum's curatorial departments as well as the entire Department of European Paintings and the entire Department of American Paintings and Sculpture. Includes an illustrated Timeline of Art History.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Collections

Provides access to nearly 336,500 works of art from the museum’s permanent collection of 450,00 objects, through images, curatorial writings and reference material.

MuseumStuff.com

Provides access to a guide to museum-related information, including links to museum websites and virtual exhibits, educational and entertaining games and activities, and extensive learning resources concerning topics typically promoted through art, science and history museums. Many of the museum sites provide access to their permanent collections, accompanied by images.

National Gallery/London Collection Online

Provides access to illustrations and descriptions of the National Gallery permanent collection and long-term loans.

National Gallery of Art (U.S.) Collection

National Library of Australia, PictureAustralia

Provides a gateway site to online image collections in Australia. A hyperlink to the image provider's site allows a user to locate offline image collections and order copies.

New York Public Library Digital Gallery

Provides access to over 480,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of the New York Public Library.

Perseus Digital Library

Provides coverage of the Greco-Roman Classical world, as well as the European Renaissance. Although the site emphasizes classical texts, it also provides access to a large visual from institutions and individual researchers around the world relating to ancient Greece and Rome.

Philadelphia Museum of Art Collections

Provides access to almost 5,000 objects with images from the collections online. The database allows browsing by Social Tagging, or a folksonomy, which is a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content, such as Web pages, photographs, and Web links, using open-ended labels called tags.

Sotheby’s

Provides browsable or searchable catalogs of upcoming and past sales, along with downloadable mid-resolution images, upon free registration.

SPIRO: Slide and Photograph Retrieval Online

Provides online public access to the catalog of the 35mm slide collection of the Architecture Visual Resources Library (AVRL) at the University of California at Berkeley. The collection numbers over 250,000 slides and 20,000 photographs.

Thinker ImageBase, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Provides access to image and text database of objects from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor). The collections (110,000+ objects) belong to the people of the City and County of San Francisco.

TimePix

Provides for free access to a large portfolio of online images from the Time-Life magazine and the Mansell collections. Watermarked images in the JPEG format can be downloaded.

Virtual Museum Canada Image Gallery

Provides access to over 420 000 images digital images from museum collections in Canada.

University of California Image Service Collections

Provides access to digital image collections and robust tools in support of teaching, learning, and research primarily for faculty and students of the University of California, but some collections are available to the general public.

Visual Arts Data Service (VADS)

Provides access to and preservation of the VADS collection of visual arts digital resources and advises in all areas of digital creation, use and management. Part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), VADS is based at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, University College. Online visual resources accessible through the Search Collections link are intended for the use of higher-education institutions in the U.K.

Visual Collections: Images of Art, History and Culture

Provides access to a database maintained by David Rumsey containing dozens of digital image collections from museums, universities and private collections throughout the world. Cartography Associates strives to provide an on-line environment wherein all types of digital collections from a wide range of resources can be seamlessly fused together into one large, comprehensive collection.

Web Gallery of Art

Provides access to a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism periods (1100-1850), currently containing over 18.400 reproductions. Picture commentaries and artist biographies are available.

WorldImages

Provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project, containing over 60,000 images. It is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. WorldImages is accessible anywhere and its images may be freely used for non-profit educational purposes.