Open access image libraries – a handy list

Apollo supports open access to images of artworks that are out of copyright. Below is a list of museums and other archives that provide unrestricted downloads of high-resolution images.

This list will be updated on a regular basis. Please contact Lucy Waterson at lucy@apollomag.com to suggest further relevant image archives for inclusion.

Art Institute of Chicago
More than 50,000 images of works in the collection

Belvedere, Vienna
Roughly half of an 18,600-strong collection, including the world-famous group of works by Klimt and Schiele

Birmingham Museums Trust
Nearly 2,500 images from across the eight municipal collections looked after by the trust. More are gradually being added.

Cleveland Art Museum
30,000 works from the collection

Harvard Art Museums
More than 200,000 images available from the university’s collections of 250,000 objects

J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
More than 100,000 images from the museum and the Getty Research Center archives

Kunstmuseum Basel
More than 4,100 photographs of works in the public domain

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Millions of images from the national archives

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Nearly 20,000 images from the collections

Mauritshuis, The Hague
The full collection of more than 800 works, mainly by Dutch and Flemish masters

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
More than 400,000 images

Minneapolis Institute of Art
Access to more than 50,000 works

Munch Museet, Norway
One of the world’s largest single-artist collections: 1,150 paintings and some 18,000 prints, free to download

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington
Around 30,000 images from New Zealand’s state collections

Národní galerie Praha
The Czech Republic’s national collections in Prague

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
More than 51,000 works in the public domain

Nationalmuseet Danmark
More than 50,000 images from 20 institutions across Denmark

Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
6,000 images – most of the collection – via Wikimedia Commons

New York Public Library
180,000 items, free to share and reuse

Paris Musées
320,000 images from 14 Parisian institutions, including the Petit Palais and the Catacombs

Pinakotheken, Munich
More than 10,000 works from the Bavarian State Paintings Collections – free to download and reuse

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
360,000 images – more than a third of the collection

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 
As of 26 February 2020, 2.8m digitised images from across the Smithsonian’s multiple museums, research centres, libraries and archives are freely available online.

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Full access to out-of-copyright works. Strong on Munich-based painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Around 15,000 works (of a quarter of a million) have been photographed in hi-res, with all public domain images free to download and use

Wellcome Collection, London
Thousands of archival images from the science collections at the museum and library

Yale University
Some 250,000 images from the university collections, including the Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art