Provided by web design agency, IM Creator Ltd., IM Free Collections is “a curated collection of free web design resources”. The images are from various image sources that provided these images on Creative Commons licenses. Users can search or browse by various categories.
Life of Pix offers high-resolution photographs with no copyright restrictions. The photographs were contributed by Montreal-based Leeroy Advertising Agency and its network of photographers. To date, the site contains close to 600 images. Life of Pix also has a sister site, Life of Vids, that provides access to public domain videos.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is “a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global ‘biodiversity commons'”. Started in 2011, the staff of BHL began to upload illustrations from books in their collections. These illustrations were created over the past 500 years. To date, more than 98,000 of natural history and botanical illustrations have been uploaded to their Flickr account.
Gratisography contains high-resolution pictures that were photographed by Ryan McGuire of Bells Design. New pictures are added on a weekly basis.
Viintage Graphics is a “public domain image repository” that focuses on the term “vintage”. Through their website, users can browse the images by collections.
The Pattern Library is an ongoing project that compiles patterns by designers. The site is developed by Tim Holman and Claudio Guglieri.
Created and curated by Atle Mo, Subtle Patterns is a free resource for textured patterns. Users can also purchase their plugin to use their resource directly from Adobe Photoshop.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA in short, is an American agency that pioneers in aeronautics research, space explorations and operations, space technology and science. Their image galleries provide access to non-copyrighted up-to-date images and other multimedia files that were captured from their operations, missions and research.
One of the oldest and largest museums in Japan, TNM features collections of art and archaeological artefacts in Japan. TNM contains two image databases: The TNM Collections and e-Museum. The TNM contains about 600 works owned by TNM, such as paintings, calligraphy, sculpture, decorative arts and archaeology. The e-Musuem contains images of national treasures and important cultural properties owned by Japan’s four National Institutes for Cultural Heritage (Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara and Kyushu).
The Van Gogh Museum is an art museum dedicated to the works of Vincent van Gogh. It contains the largest collection of his paintings and drawings in the world. The digital collection contains more than 830 works by Vincent and his contemporaries. The digital images of the works can be downloaded for non-commercial purposes in high-resolution, which are an average of 6,000 x 6,000 pixels. The collection can be searched or filtered by artist, location, year, type and genre.
Unsplash is a collection of high-resolution stock images by Canada-based design agency, Crew. 10 new photographs are uploaded every 10 days.
NGA Images is an online repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. The Gallery has one of the finest art collections in the world with works spanning from the Middle Ages to present day. Their strongest collection is the Italian Renaissance collection, which includes masterpieces from Raphael, Titian, Filippo Lippi and Giovanni Bellini. Through NGA Images, more than 37,000 digital images are available free of charge for download and use.
The collection provides access to more than 125,000 paintings by Dutch artists, such as Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer. Users can explore and search the entire collection, which is handily sorted by artist, subject, style and even by events in Dutch history. Each painting can be downloaded in high-resolution or view at close-up. The museum also provides an application, RijksStudio, to invite users to create their own masterpieces by downloading images of artworks or details of artworks in the Rijksmuseum collection and using them in a creative way.