Art History 496: Special Topic: What is Islamic Art?

The Met collection includes over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks, available for free and unrestricted use under CC0.

The Smithsonian allows you to download, share, and reuse millions of the their images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 5.1 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections. Includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

The majority of The Walters’ digital photography represents artworks that are no longer protected under the work creators’ copyright and are therefore considered to be in the public domain. Because The Walters owns or has jurisdiction over the objects in its collection and owns or customarily obtains the rights to any imaging of its collection objects, it has adopted the CC0 license. Walters has also applied the GNU Free Documentation License to most of its documents, which permits everyone to copy and distribute verbatim copies of a license document. Changing it is not allowed.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is proud to be an open access institution, offering the public the ability to download, share, collaborate, remix, and reuse images of public-domain artworks from the museum’s collection, as well as metadata for the entire collection—all without asking permission. High-resolution images and data related to the CMA’s collection are made available under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation.

In March 2024, the Getty Museum released over 88 thousand works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the digital images of items from its collection squarely and unequivocally into the public domain. According to the museum’s press release, “users can download, edit, and repurpose high resolution images of their favorite Getty artworks without any legal restrictions.”