Copyright & Images: Images & Copyright

Academic Images: Copyright vs Public Domain

Images that are not in the Public Domain are protected by Copyright Law.  The Fair use exception allows for a limited use of images for educational purposes without obtaining permission from the copyright holders. Some copyrighted images may be offered for reuse under a Creative Commons license which grants permission to the public to access, share and reproduce those works. There are several different Creative Commons licenses that may be applied, so be sure to check what uses the license allows. In addition, some of the sources below may contain both public domain and Creative Commons images so it is important to check the terms of use of each image.

Creative Commons Images

• Creative Commons

  Indexes over 300 million images from multiple image collections, including works from museum, photos from Flickr, etc. All of the indexed images are in the public domain and released under Creative Commons licenses--meaning the images are generally free to use in a non-commercial setting.

• Google Image

  Searchable by text or image. Allows to filter search by usage rights (educational purposes, publishing, etc.)

• Copyright Law + Using Images and Photos from Google

  Guide on how to use images found via Google legally

The Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program

• The Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program makes available publication-quality images for use in scholarly publications free of charge. The IAP program was initiated by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 to help address the challenges of scholarly publishing in the digital age by providing free images for academic publications through an automated Web-based service. This service is intended for individual scholars who are working on a particular book, article, or website that meets criteria established by the museum contributors.

  NCAD subscribes to Artstor and students and staff can access these images through; Open Athens or clicking on https://library.artstor.org/#/home. Use the Keyword Search and enter "images for academic publishing." You can then search within your results using additional keywords and phrases. The eligible results will feature the IAP icon beneath the thumbnail image. 

  

  IAP makes available images from:

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  Brooklyn Museum Costumes
  Mellink Archive of Bryn Mawr College
  Dallas Museum of Art
  Getty Research Institute: Photo Archives
  Getty Research Institute: Study of Photographs of Tapestries
  Indianapolis Museum of Art
  Northwestern University Library: Ramon Casas sketchbooks
  Princeton University Art Museum
  The Walters Art Museum
  Yale University Art Gallery

  For more information, visit Artstor's IAP help page. 

Additional Images for Academic Publishing

There is an ever-growing list of museums that are making high-resolution images of works no longer under copyright,  available to be used without restriction.  Check individual museum sites and "terms of use"  to see how their images can be used. Make sure image quality standards offered by individual sites comply with quality standards requested by publishers (file size, clarity, sharpness, etc.).  Below is a selective list of such providers.

• Getty Open Content Image Collection

  The Getty makes available, without charge, more than 10,000 images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute in the Open Content Program. The Getty holds the rights to these images or they are in the public domain and they can be used for any purpose. No permission is required