Finding Digital Images - ART 150 - Drawing I - LibGuides at Central Washington University

Image Databases

For a complete list of recommended databases for art literature and images, explore our databases by subject list. The databases and resources listed here are recommended for finding images.

Europeana
Gateway to digitized resources from more than 2,000 European cultural institutions including museums, libraries, and archives. Formats include images, texts (books, primary documents, articles), sound, and video.
NYPL Digital Gallery
Some 600,000 digital images from within the NYPL's collections. Browse by subjects alphabetically listed or by suggested disciplines. Explore this collection if you need images of postcards, posters, photographs, etc. of technological changes, specific people and historic events throughout America...not just New York.

Artstor
Artstor is a nonprofit digital library of more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences. Registered users can save and organize Artstor images into groups, export image groups as a PowerPoint 2007 file for classroom presentations or share with other users at CWU through a stable URL link. For detailed instructions for registering, see Artstor's online help.

Note: Artstor is moving to JSTOR. The Artstor website will be retired next year on Aug. 1, 2024, but you can get started with using Artstor resources on JSTOR now. Link to the Artstor experience on JSTOR. Your existing Artstor user account will work on JSTOR.

Google Images

Not everything found through Google Images is appropriate. However, you can use the filter at the top to limit your search to only images that are "labeled for reuse" and subsequent categories.

Primary Sources and Image Research

Getty Research Institute
Getty Research Portal is an "online search platform providing global access to digitized art history texts in the public domain. Through this multilingual, multicultural union catalog, scholars can search and download complete digital copies of publications for the study of art, architecture, material culture, and related fields." Links to the more comprehensive, but not entirely free or electronically accessible, Getty Research Institute Search Tools and Databases. See the left menu for access to the Getty vocabularies, a photo archive, digital collections, the Getty Provenance Index Databases, and more.