Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive

[Paul Bryan]

From https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2025/01/announcing-the-public-domain-image-archive/:

After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse.

This may come in handy for those seeking cover images.

[Brendan Fattig]

The sources page might also be very useful:

[Vince]

The first one I looked at had an IA archive link that no longer exists; the second one went to a search result page with a couple of dozen of other works, so I had to figure out which one was the one I clicked on, and then it doesn’t have any indication of PD status.

So, for ideas about covers, yes, but our requirements for PD proof will still apply.

[Asher Smith]

There do seem to be some fun things there, for sure. I wonder if it's worth noting that, because it looks like this image from the Wellcome collection would fit the policy and the Wellcome isn't currently on our list of approved museums.

[Lukas Bystricky]

That seems to just have a Public Domain mark, which is not the same as CC0 (which is what we require). 

[Brendan Fattig]

It looks like all of the sources labeled CC0 at https://pdimagearchive.org/sources/ are already on our list of approved museums except two.

The only two that are not are MKG Collection[1] and Musée Carnavalet.[2] However, I don’t think MKG hosts paintings and as far as I can tell, Carnavalet has all their paintings also at Paris Musées which is already on our list.

[1] https://sammlungonline.mkg-hamburg.de/en

[2] https://www.carnavalet.paris.fr/en/collections/collections