Research Guides: Craft and Material Studies: Images

Digital Image Databases

Use digital image collections available through VCU Libraries to find high resolution images for educational
(teaching, study, and research) purposes.

JSTOR: Image Search
Database featuring a range of images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences, from libraries, museums, and archives worldwide. Includes ARTSTOR's collections of images for education and research.
Oxford Art Online
Integrated searchable access to Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, and more.
(Limited to 3 simultaneous users)
Bloomsbury Fashion Central
Contains Berg Fashion Library, which provides cross-searchable access to interdisciplinary text and image content on world dress and fashion. Includes e-books, reference works, images, and more.
Bloomsbury Design Library
Cross-searchable access to a broad and expanding range of encyclopedias, reference works, e-books, images, and more covering the global history, theory, and practice of crafts and design.
WGSN (World Global Style Network)
Focusing on the areas and intersections of fashion, style, and commerce, WGSN provides a global view on trends in design. Its archive contains millions of images from the runways, the street, retail outlets, and design sketches.

Art & Design Image Websites

Image databases available online often contain high quality images that are invisible to web crawlers.
You can use search engines and directories to locate these databases. Some examples are:

Finding Images Blackboard Course
A tutorial offering tools and tips to aid in the discovery and use of images found on the Web.
Ad*Access
Provides access to digital images print advertisements published primarily in the United States and Canada between 1911 and 1957.
AICT: Art Images for College Teaching
Intended primarily to disseminate images of art and architectural works in the public domain on a free-access, free-use basis to all levels of the educational community, as well as to the public at large.
Creative Commons Search
Access to search engines that allow Creative Commons searches.
Flickr
A photo sharing site. Search member created tags or search the Flickr Creative Commons pool at www.flickr.com/creativecommons
Freerange
Free stock photos for commercial and non-commercial use - advertising revenue supported.
Galaxy of Images
Contains a portion of the more than 1.5 million printed books and manuscripts in the collections of Smithsonian Institution Libraries.
Google Arts & Culture
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.
Google Material Design Icons
Open-source package of 750 icons targeted for designers and developers for use in mobile apps and interactive projects.
Internet Archive Book Images
Flickr archive with over 2.6 million + public domain images from books, magazines, and newspapers published over the last 500 years. Images and captions harvested from Google Book project.
The Library of Congress’s Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
"Include photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings" primarily on American history.
Luna Commons Public Collections
Luna Commons is a database of sixteen free digital image collections. There are over 100,000 images all available for download in good resolution. Featured collections include: Pratt Institute Fashion Plate Collection, The Farber Gravestones Collection, Maps of Africa, Cornell Political Americana Collection, and the The Estate Collection of Art by HIV+ artists.
National Gallery of Art - NGA Images
A repository of over 42,000 open access digital images from the collections of the National Gallery of Art.
Noun Project
Graphic symbols and photos created by contributors from around the world. Symbols and photos are freely available for use under public domain or CCBY license (with attribution), or without attribution for a small fee.
NYPL Digital Gallery
New York Public Library's searchable database of 275,000 photographs and manuscripts from its collections. Also browsable by names and subjects.
OAIster
A freely-accessible site for searching freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources.
Opensource.com Flickr stream
Article illustrations provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license. This means that anyone, anywhere can use the images created for opensource.com as long as they give us credit and keep it licensed under Creative Commons.
Pexels
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. All photos are tagged, searchable and also easy to discover.
Pixabay
A repository of public domain pictures including free vectors, drawings and photos. You can use any Pixabay image without attribution in digital and printed form, even for commercial applications.
Photodune
Royalty free stock photography from $1.
Public Domain Vectors
65,000+ vector images in the public domain.
PX Here
Find and share images free of copyrights. All pictures are released under Creative Commons CC0 into the public domain.
Raw Pixel
Public Domain Vintage Design Resources with a CC0 License • Photos and Graphic Illustrations.
Shared Shelf Commons
A free, open-access library of images. Search and browse collections with tools to zoom, print, export, and share images.
Unsplash
Over 300,000 free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.
Visual Arts Data Service
100,000 images free for use in education.
Storyset.com
Free illustrations to customize, animate and download to make landing pages, apps or presentations.

Diverse Identities Image Websites

AllGo
Photos available for all uses that feature plus-size people.
Blackillustrations.com
illustrations of black people in multiple formats for your next digital project. Free for commercial use.
Disabled and Here
A disability-led stock image and interview series celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).
Images of Empowerment
A free library of images celebrating women’s lives and their work in 12 countries around the world.
Nappy
Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free.
PICNOI
Diverse multi-racial stock photography images, free to use.
The Gender Spectrum Collection
A stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés. You may not create derivative work from the images or use the images for commercial purposes.

Craft and Material Studies

Related Guide

Material Connexion

JSTOR Image Search

Digital Image Databases

Art & Design Image Websites