Tag: free images

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Images on the Web News

Met Releases 400,000 Digital Images for Use

On May 16, the Metropolitan Museum announced a new initiative called the Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) and released more than 400,000 images of public domain works on their website. Users can download the high-resolution files directly from the website for any non-commercial use, including scholarly publications. Users do not need to pay a fee and will not need to seek permission from the museum. Per the Met’s press release, “the number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis.”

The Met joins several other institutions in making high-resolution digital image files of collection objects free available on the web, including Rijksmuseum, LACMA, and the Getty. The Met was one of the first participants in ARTstor’s Images for Academic Publishing initiative, but in order to use those images, the user needed to be affiliated with an institution that had an ARTstor subscription or request a temporary password. The new OASC program makes the images available directly to the public from the museum’s collections website.

For more information, visit the Met’s FAQ about the OASC initiative or explore their collections website. Images included in the initiative will be indicated

Via the Metropolitan Museum Press Room.

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Images on the Web News Photography

35 Million Getty Images Free to Embed and Use Online

Yesterday, Getty Images released more than 35 million images that users can embed on websites and social media posts for free, so long as the images are for editorial and non-commercial purposes. With the embed feature, Getty Images includes a credit line and link to each image that users post. For a list of images available to embed, click here.

There’s been quite a lot of coverage about this monumental release of “free” images, including great articles from the Atlantic on “Why Getty Going Free Is Such a Big Deal, Explained in Getty Images,” and the Verge on “The world’s largest photo service just made its pictures free to use.” It’s important to note that not all Getty Images are free to use, and it’s very likely that contemporary photojournalism images, for example, will remain behind the paywall.

Also fun to think about on a Friday: How many photos have ever been taken?

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary News VRC

Access to 15,000+ Comics at the Digital Comic Museum

The Digital Comic Museum has digitized more than 15,000 comic books from the Golden Age of comics, or in the years before 1959. The DCM has a forum for users to submit historical research and commentary on the comics. While you won’t find any Marvel superheroes here, there’s a wide variety of themes within the comic world, including romance, Westerns, combat, crime, supernatural, and horror. Users have to create an account to download images.

Check out the Digital Comic Museum for more information and to download images.

Via Open Culture.

Categories
Images on the Web

Wellcome Library Releases High-Resolution Images Free of Charge

From the Wellcome Library:

We are delighted to announce that over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available through Wellcome Images.

Drawn from our vast historical holdings, the images are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.

This means that they can be used for commercial or personal purposes, with an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London). All of the images from our historical collections can be used free of charge.

The images can be downloaded in high-resolution directly from the Wellcome Images website for users to freely copy, distribute, edit, manipulate, and build upon as you wish, for personal or commercial use. The images range from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Francisco Goya.

The earliest item is an Egyptian prescription on papyrus, and treasures include exquisite medieval illuminated manuscripts and anatomical drawings, from delicate 16th century fugitive sheets, whose hinged paper flaps reveal hidden viscera to Paolo Mascagni’s vibrantly coloured etching of an ‘exploded’ torso.

Other treasures include a beautiful Persian horoscope for the 15th-century prince Iskandar, sharply sketched satires by Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank, as well as photography from  Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of motion. John Thomson’s remarkable nineteenth century portraits from his travels in China can be downloaded, as well a newly added series of photographs of hysteric and epileptic patients at the famous Salpêtrière Hospital.

Above Image: Wellcome Library, London. Horoscope of Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, the Turkman Mongol conqueror.

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology Islamic

Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan

The University of Michigan Library recently announced that it has completed cataloging its entire Islamic Manuscripts Collection, which resulted in the creation if 883 new catalog records and expanding 21 existing descriptions. Now that the project is complete, the entire collection is available in the library’s online catalog, complete with detailed, searchable descriptions.

Additionally, there are digital surrogates for 912 manuscripts from the library’s collection available in the HathiTrust Digital Library. There, users can view the digitized manuscripts in a page viewer or download the entire book or individual pages as PDFs.

The Library created a research guide for the collection, which provides stellar information on the history and scope of the collection, as well as search strategies, policies for viewing manuscripts in the library, and instructions on how to access the digitized manuscripts in HathiTrust.

Image from [al-Ḥizb al-aʻẓam maʻa Dalāʼil al-khayrāt, . Qārī al-Harawī, ʻAlī ibn Sulṭān Muḥammad, d. 1605 or 6.

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Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary Museums News VRC

South Side Community Art Center Now Publicly Available in LUNA

Over the summer, the VRC announced that images of artworks held by the South Side Community Art Center were newly added to our LUNA database. We’re now thrilled to announce that the collection has been made publicly available in LUNA, so anyone can access the more than 350 images!

To view the collection, click here. For more information, see our previous post about the SSCAC’s collection.

 

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Images on the Web Museums VRC

Images from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO provides images (up to 1536 pixels) of objects in their collections to users free of charge for educational purposes only. Images can be found on their website under Search the Collection. To place an order for digital images of collection images for teaching and research, request them via email at nebersole@nelson-atkins.org or via their Library’s Contact Us form (be sure to select Visual Resources Library in the Subject/Department drop-down list). The library will send you the requested images via email.

The Nelson-Atkins also contributed 15 scrolling paintings to our Digital Scrolling Paintings website—you can view them here.

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ARTstor VRC

ARTstor Content in DPLA

ARTstor recently released almost 13,000 images  from the University of Delaware and Washington University in St. Louis for inclusion with the Digital Public Library of America. To date, ARTstor has contributed almost 30,000 images from its to the DPLA, and there is an ongoing initiative to add more content.

For more information, check out the images that ARTstor has contributed to the DPLA to date!

And if you want to see the whole set of images that are in ARTstor’s Shared Shelf Commons (a free, open access image library, you can check those out, too!

Via ARTstor Blog

Categories
Images on the Web News

The Getty Adds Special Collections Materials to Open Content Program

In mid-October, the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections announced that it has added 5,400 artwork images from special collections to the Open Content Program, which brings the total number of images that are freely available without copyright restrictions to more than 10,000.

The newly added content includes “artist’ sketchbooks, drawings and watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks, and early photographs of the Middle East and Asia.” For example, there are more than thirty early photographs from Mayan archaeological sites.

For more information, check out our previous blog post on the Getty’s Open Content Program, or explore the 10,000 public domain images here!

Via The Getty Iris

Image: [Nunnery complex (Uxmal, Mexico): detail of facade frieze], 1882, GRI Digital Collections, 94-F125.

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Innovative Technology VRC

Europeana Open Culture App

This summer, the Europeana digital library launched its first app, Open Culture, which includes a selection of 350,000 images from its online collection of cultural objects from Europe’s institutions. The app is organizied around five curated themes, including Maps and Plans, Treasures of Art, Treasures of the Past, Treasures of Nature, and Images of the Past.

Users can perform keyword searches in the app, or browse through a visual wall of image thumbnails. You can also save favorites, add comments, and share object records on Facebook or Twitter. Perhaps best of all: the images included in the Europeana Open Culture app are either in the public domain or openly licensed, so they may be used for any publishing purpose.

For more information, stop by the VRC to explore Open Culture on our iPad, or visit the App Store.

Via Europeana Blog