LibGuides: Photos, Image Collections, Textures: Museum Collections

Digital Collections from Select Museums and Archives

American Memory (Library of Congress)
Comprising more than 9 million items that document U.S. history and culture, this resource is organized into 100+ thematic collections based on their original format, subject matter, or who first created, assembled, or donated them to the Library.
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The original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music.
Artsy
Artsy has 350,000 images of art, architecture, and design by 50,000 artists with a focus on modern works.
Canadian Art Database
The database contains 54,000+ images and media files, 1200+ full text books and articles, and several sub-projects documenting artist groups and art organizations.
City of Toronto Archives: Image Search
Access hundreds of photographs from Toronto's history. Search by keyword or date.
CyberMuse (National Gallery of Canada)
Contains over 10 000 images from the Gallery's permanent collection.
Google Art Project
Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.
Images Canada
Provides access to the thousands of images held on the websites of participating Canadian cultural institutions. Find images of Canadian events, people, places and things that make up our collective heritage.
McCord Museum
The McCord Museum holds over 1,375,000 objects, images and manuscripts documenting the social history and material culture of Montreal, Quebec and Canada.
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The "Keys to History" digital on-line image collection is made up of 135,000 artifacts. Almost 117,000 artifacts held by the McCord and some 17,500 artifacts held by the partner museums are available for viewing.
National Gallery of Art - (NGA Images)
This is an open access image repository for items in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Users can download low resolution images but sign up for a free account to download high resolution images.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to 600,000+ images digitized from primary sources & printed rarities, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints/photographs, illustrated books, and more.
Our Ontario
Provides images, audio, video and text representative of Ontario life and culture, history, government, business and scientific heritage. Browse the image collections.
Virtual Museum Canada
This site contains over 500 virtual exhibits and an image gallery with 420,000 images.
World Art Treasure
Berger Foundation : Contains more than 100,000 images of Western European, Chinese, Japanese and Indian painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Yale Digital Commons
Open access to digital representations of works in the public domain from museum, library, and archive collections at Yale University. Although it's not limited to images, there are more than 250,000 online images available in the collection.
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This is the URL for the collection with 2 filters applied: one for available online and one for open access.

Using Internet Images

Many internet images can be used for educational purposes according to the new Fair Dealing guidelines. Check out our advice for using internet images for students and faculty.

You can copy and paste or link to Publicly Available Material (PAM) from the internet as long as it is for educational purposes and you follow the conditions below.

Conditions:

you have to cite the material
you can’t use the material if there is a lock on the website, like a password preventing the general public from accessing it
you can’t use the material if there is a “clearly visible notice” saying you cannot use the material and has to be more than merely a copyright symbol “©”
you can’t use the material if you know (or can logically guess) it was posted online without the consent of the copyright owner