Art and Design: Image Banks

Art Resource is the world's largest fine art stock photo archive, with more than 1,000,000 searchable fine art images from the world's leading sources, available for licensing to all media.

Provides references to museum collection websites where over 7,000 artists' works of art can be viewed. Most of the fine artists specialise in painting and sculpture but other artistic media are covered. Searching is by artist or movement. The articles library is a subscription library.

A national online resource for information about contemporary art and artists based round a searchable directory of current practising artists in the UK. Artists entries include biographies, images, audio, film and video clips, past and future events.

Search & download rights managed art & history images, illustration, photography, video clips. Contact Bridgeman for rights clearances & research.

Searchable index of the British Museum Collections featuring over 5,000 items.

This is a federated image search engine combining Google Images, Flickr, Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons and many more.

Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under various types of license.

Over 10,000 images from the J Paul Getty museum, including paintings, photographs, sketchbooks and prints. All the open content images are available to be used without permission

For over 100 years, the UK Government Art Collection has collected works of art to promote British art and artists. Explore over 11,000 images from the Collection here.

This lists sources that provide images for a wide range of uses, including academic and scholarly use, with a focus on images suitable for publication.

Provides free accessto high quality images from worldwide digital collections of reputable organisations such as galleries and museums using the Luna Insight browser.

This site contains free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free. For commercial and personal use.

NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images.
More than 45,000 open access digital images up to 4000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use

Over 35,000 open access digital images from the collections of the US National Gallery of Art.

More than fifty thousand images of the National Portrait Gallery's Collections available for academic use. Low resolution images are available to copy and distribute via a Creative Commons licence and higher resolution ones via a more restrictive Academic Licence. Look at specific pictures' "Use this image" information.

Images of the buildings and objects in the care of the National Trust.

All photos can be used and downloaded for free, full details under the ‘license’ tab.

A collection of over 1.6 million royalty free stock photos and videos all published under a CCO licence.

Half a million stock photographs published under a COO licence

As well as housing images from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, V&A Images holds images from the V&A Theatre Museum, V&A Museum of Childhood, the National Art Library and the Museum's Archives

VADS is the online resource for visual arts. It has provided services to the academic community for 12 years and has built up a considerable portfolio of visual art collections comprising over 100,000 images that are freely available and copyright cleared for use in learning, teaching and research in the UK.

The Visual Collections site contains dozens of digital image collections from Museums, Universities and private collections throughout the world.

This site over 15 million CC images which are categorised (by date, location, format, style etc) so you’re not reliant on keyword searches to find what you need.

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. The repository is created and maintained not by paid archivists, but by volunteers. The scope of Commons is set out on the project scope pages.

Search the holdings of the largest collection of British art outside the UK, with 47,000 records from the Elizabethan period to the present. All the painting and sculpture images are available online.