The National Geographic Society is one of the largest scientific institutions in the world, focusing on geography, archaeology, natural science, conversation and the study of world culture and history. They offer stunning photographs, which can be a good source of images in these areas for educational and personal purposes.
The British Museum is one of the largest museums in the world that is dedicated to human history and culture. Currently a work in progress, the British Museum database is “an inventory of the Museum’s collection and aims to record what is known about it”. To date, the database contains more than 2.1 million records with new records, updates and images added every week.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is continually making their collections accessible online. To date, their collections span from paintings, prints, drawings, photography to more specific works like African art, Asian art, decorative arts and new media.
The Guggenheim Museum contains an extensive holding of over 7,000 artworks from the late 19th century to present day. Their collection online presents “a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection of over 7,000 artworks”, which includes works from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The database can also be browsed by artists, dates, mediums, movements and venues.
The Tate is a group of four museums, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall and Tate Modern. The museums focus on British art and International contemporary and modern art. Its digital database contains more than 69,000 images of collections across the museums. Among them, more than 7,300 are with Creative Commons. Users can search and refine the results by date, object type, artist, subject and collection.
Compiled by Swiss UI designer, Vilem Ries, Albumarium offers high-resolution photographs, organised in different albums. Photographs on this site are contributed by users on Creative Common licenses.
Getty Images is one of the world’s leading suppliers for stock images. Through their embed tool, users can drop an image into their blog, website or social media feed without worrying about copyright restrictions. The tool will generate a code that will automatically include the necessary attribution and link back to the licensing page.
The National Gallery in London contains the national collection of Western European paintings from the 13th to the 19th centuries, with works by Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh and more. The collection can be filtered by subjects, themes, artists, styles and timeline. Subjects include Travel, Still Life & Objects, People & Costume, Land, Sea & City, Work & Leisure, Seasons & Weather, Religious & Biblical, Mythological, Plants & Animals and Historical.
Atlas is an online database that provides images and information of the works exhibited at the Louvre Museum in English language. To date, there are approximately 30,000 items in Atlas.