New public domain images!

The Public Domain Image Archive launches

It’s always a good day when The Legal Genealogist comes across a new source of public domain images.

These are, after all, by definition, images that are free for us to use, without restriction and without concern of any kind for copyright.¹

It’s an even better day when the source is “a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse.”²

And better still when the curators are from The Public Domain Review, a registered Community Interest Company in the United Kingdom “dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions.”³

The new collection — the Public Domain Image Archive, or PDIA — is a sister project to The Public Domain Review, and was launched with more than 10,000 images to start and more to be added every week. It offers “hand-picked highlights from hundreds of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, (and) also functions as a database of images featured” in The Public Domain Review itself.⁴

The images can be accessed in a number of ways. As explained in the announcement:

We intend the archive to be a place of discovery, and to this end have developed various “views” to aid exploration:

• catalogue view, to search and browse by theme, style, date, and more;
• infinite view, for a more immersive experience of the collection;
• shuffle view, a tool to easily summon images in a serendipitous manner.

So you want to show what your Italian ancestor would have seen in the winters of the 1770s looking at Mount Vesuvius? Yep. As you can see above, there’s an image for that. What a visitor to France would have seen in 1870 at the Baths of Apollo at Versailles? Yep. An image for that too. How children in Lapland might have dressed in 1905? Yep. An image for that too.

Lots of goodies — and more to come. Even better in my view is the link back to the original repository for each of these images, opening up even more potential resources we might not have thought about before.

Now, as always, a caveat: the website does not guarantee that every single image it ever presents will be totally free for reuse without any limitation at all. There’s a whole explanation of how the site presents this, and you’ll find it clearly set out on the page about “Reusing Images”.

Me? I’m going to be busy looking at the folk dress of modern day Austria and southern Germany and more about the “celestial phenomenon seen over Leipzig on February 19, 1564” and…

Have fun.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “New public domain images!,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/ : posted 9 Jan 2025).

SOURCES

Image: Peter Fabris, “Mount Vesuvius in winter, covered with snow”, 1776-9, via Public Domain Image Archive.