LibGuides: ARCH 3901: Architecture’s Global Territories: Images

Large Image Repositories

ARTstor
Searchable database of digital images and associated catalog data, with new image collections added several times a year. ARTstor covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, ethnographic and women's studies, as well as many other forms of visual culture. Users can search, view, download and organize images.

Creative Commons Search
The newly designed Creative Commons’ “CC Search” project is a still developing open online search and re-use tool that allows high-quality content from the commons to surface in a more seamless and accessible way. You can find collections from a variety of openGLAM institutions (open content from galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sources in one place.
Digital Public Library of America
A portal to the digitized collections of various institutions across the nation, including millions of photographs, documents, books, audio materials, and moving images.
Flickr
Flickr is a photo management and sharing site, which offers users the ability to search by licensing types. In advanced search by licensing information.
Google Advanced Image Search
Using Google Image Search's "Tools" menu, you can search images based on their usage rights.
Library of Congress, Digital Collections
The Library of Congress Digital Collections database offers a wide variety of public domain media materials created on behalf of, or collected by, the federal government. Items include historic maps, photographs, musical scores, oral histories, full text documents, and much more.
Museum of Modern Art
The catalog contains over 76,000 works of modern and contemporary art from the MoMA's collection of nearly 200,000 works. This database includes exhibition history, links to the Getty ULAN, and details on individual works of art.
Museum of the City of New York
This database contains over 185,000 images (including photographs, maps, archival materials and multimedia) related to the history of New York City.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
This site is a living database of the New York Public Library's digital collections with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more. It includes the digital collections for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. You can search public domain works by clicking on public domain below the search box.
Wikimedia Commons
I large repository of images that are free to use.

Image Databases in Architecture

Archnet
Archnet is an open access, intellectual resource focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues related to the Muslim world.

ARTstor
Searchable database of digital images and associated catalog data, with new image collections added several times a year. ARTstor covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, ethnographic and women's studies, as well as many other forms of visual culture. Users can search, view, download and organize images.

Europeana
Europeana brings together the digital collections from cultural and scientific institutions across Europe. Explore 58,245,986 artworks, artifacts, books, films and music from European museums, galleries, libraries and archives.
RIBApix
RIBApix is a visual archive of over 95,000 digital images brought to you from the magnificent collections of the British Architectural Library
Society of Architectural Historians (SAHARA)
SAHARA is a digital image archive developed by the Society of Architectural Historians in collaboration with Artstor. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SAHARA contains over 155,000 images of architecture and landscapes contributed by SAH members—architects, scholars, photographers, graduate students, preservationists, and others who share an interest in the built environment.

Finding Quality Images

Reverse Google Image Search

Reverse Google Image Search allows you to search in Google using the image file itself rather than doing a keyword search. This is useful for pinpointing images that are the same or similar to the image your are looking for. Simply go to https://images.google.com/ and drag and drop your image file into the search box.

Artstor

Artstor offers more than one million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences with a suite of tools for doing research. Images in Artstor are high quality images for download, with complete descriptive information related to the image itself, and the object(s) depicted.

Advanced Search: Allows you to search by architect, image creator, and project, and further limit your search by location, classification (architecture, decorative arts, drawing, etc.), by date, or search within institutional collections like Columbia University Image Bank, or all of Artstor.

Results: You can further refine your search results in the result page.

Image View: Offers you all the the rights information you need to make a full citation, and also offers other important information you might not find elsewhere. You can also download high resolution images directly from this page.