Why this list exists
Every writer, teacher, and designer who has gone looking for a usable museum image has hit the same wall: a dozen "free stock photo" roundups that quietly mix in images still under copyright, alongside real open-access programs whose terms pages are three clicks deep and easy to misread. This page checks ten of the largest open-access programs directly against their own current policy pages, on the date given below, and lays out what each one actually allows.
This is also a page UmberLore uses itself: every image on this site is sourced from one of the programs below or from a comparable public-domain source, and this table is the reference we check before publishing an image credit.
The directory
| Institution | Open collection size | License | Commercial use | Access | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Metropolitan Museum of Art | ~492,000 images | CC0 | Yes, unrestricted | Public API + full GitHub dataset | Terms page |
| Rijksmuseum | 700,000+ images | CC0 / Public Domain Mark | Yes, unrestricted | Rijksdata API; free account needed for max-resolution download | Terms page |
| Art Institute of Chicago | 50,000+ images | CC0 | Yes, unrestricted | Public API (api.artic.edu) + IIIF | Terms page |
| Smithsonian Institution (20+ museums) | 2.8 million+ images at launch, grown since | CC0 | Yes, unrestricted | Public API via api.data.gov (free key) | Terms page |
| Cleveland Museum of Art | 37,000+ images (of 64,000+ catalog records) | CC0 | Yes, unrestricted | Open API, no key required | Terms page |
| Getty (Open Content Program) | 88,000+ images | CC0 | Yes, unrestricted | Direct download from object pages; no bulk API | Terms page |
| National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) | 60,000+ images | CC0 | Yes, unrestricted | Open Data GitHub dataset (130,000+ object records) + object-page downloads | Terms page |
| Paris Musées (14 City of Paris museums) | 150,000+ images | CC0 | Yes, unrestricted | Direct download via parismuseescollections.paris.fr; mirrored on Wikimedia Commons | Terms page |
| British Museum | 1.9 million images | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | No, non-commercial only | Collection Online database | Terms page |
| Wikimedia Commons | Millions (aggregated from many institutions, including several above) | CC0 / Public Domain (for faithful 2D reproductions of PD art) | Yes, unrestricted | Public API + bulk data dumps | Terms page |
Terms verified directly against each institution's own policy page on 2026-09-15. Licensing programs change; re-check the linked terms page before relying on this table for a specific image.
What to check before you reuse an image
| Institution | What to know before you use it |
|---|---|
| The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Covers accessioned public-domain works only; images still under copyright are excluded. |
| Rijksmuseum | The free-account requirement is only a download gate, not a licensing restriction. |
| Art Institute of Chicago | Filter search results by "CC0" or "public domain" to isolate the open-license subset. |
| Smithsonian Institution (20+ museums) | Spans 20+ separate Smithsonian museums and archives; coverage varies unit by unit. |
| Cleveland Museum of Art | Not every catalog record has an accompanying open image; check the record’s own flag. |
| Getty (Open Content Program) | Getty asks for a courtesy credit line, but it is not a legal condition of the CC0 grant. |
| National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) | Only images the Gallery believes are in the public domain are included; some cataloged works are not. |
| Paris Musées (14 City of Paris museums) | The site name is French-only; the linked page also lists which works remain under rights and are excluded. |
| British Museum | The one major outlier on this list: attribution is required and commercial use is not permitted without a separate paid license. |
| Wikimedia Commons | Not a museum itself. Verify the original source and license tag on each individual file page before reuse. |
The recurring mistake is treating "open access" as a single license. It is not. CC0 (used by nine of the ten programs above) puts the image fully in the public domain: no permission, no attribution, no restriction on commercial use. CC BY-NC-SA (the British Museum’s license) is a genuinely different, more restrictive grant: it requires credit, forbids commercial use outright, and requires any adaptation to carry the same license forward. Confusing the two is the single most common licensing mistake in roundup posts about "free museum images."
A second distinction worth holding onto: several CC0 programs (Getty is the clearest example) ask for a courtesy credit line even though the license itself does not require one. Giving that credit is good practice and costs nothing, but it is worth knowing the difference between a request and a legal condition when you are deciding how to caption an image.
How this list was built
Inclusion criteria: a national or major encyclopedic museum, gallery, or archive with an explicit, named open-access or open-content program, and a policy page published by the institution itself (not a third-party summary) that states the license terms in writing. Ten programs meeting that bar are listed above; there are others (regional museums, smaller archives) that were not checked for this first version and may be added later.
Every license, collection-size figure, and access method in the table above was checked against the institution’s own terms or FAQ page linked in the Source column, not against secondary write-ups, on the verification date given below the table.
Cite this
UmberLore Editorial, “The Open-License Museum Image Directory: Where to Find Art You Can Actually Use,” UmberLore, published September 15, 2026, https://umberlore.com/open-license-art-image-directory/.
