Research Librarian
Find Digital Images in our Collections
Amherst College Library subscribes to a variety of image databases, and is the home of Amherst College Digital Collections (ACDC), a repository of images, texts, videos, and more from the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections and Art & Architecture Collection.
Access digital images through these library databases or online resources:
- Amherst College Art & Architecture Collection (now on JSTOR) This link opens in a new windowDigital image collection of high quality photographs for scholarship and teaching in architecture and the visual arts. This collection was formerly part of the Amherst College Digital Collections repository and is now hosted on JSTOR.
- ARTstor This link opens in a new windowImage database including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual culture.
- Bridgeman Education This link opens in a new windowA visual resource offering digital images of art, history, and culture from museums, galleries, private collections, and contemporary artists.
- Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new windowAccess to Grove Art Online and other Oxford art reference works covering all forms of the visual arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic and decorative arts, and photography from prehistory to the present.
Find Digital Images Online
There are many online image resources. Some of the most robust include:
- Ad* Access from Duke - U.S. and Canadian advertisements dated between 1911 and 1955.
- Ancient World Image Bank at NYU - free digital imagery for the study of the ancient world
- Artsy Education - artworks from galleries, museums, and private collections
- Civil Rights Digital Library - Compilation of digitized primary source material including film archive from two Georgia television stations, oral histories, documents and photographs.
- Creative Commons Search - free content in the public domain and under Creative Commons licenses
- Digital Public Library of America - catalog of public domain and openly licensed images and other digitized materials from archives, libraries, museums, and other U.S. cultural heritage institutions
- Digital Scriptorium - image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts
- Europeana - artworks, artifacts, books, films, and music from European museums, galleries, libraries and archives
- Flickr Commons - public photography archives from major institutions
- Getty Open Content Images database - digitized materials from the Research Institute's collection
- Art Project of Google Cultural Institute - images of works from museums around the world
- International Center of Photography (ICP) - archives of exhibitions from the museum
- Library of Congress American Memory - open-access photograph collection
- Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection - digitized documentary photographs, architecture, design, and engineering materials, and prints
- LIFE magazine photo archive - photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today
- Luna Commons - over 225,000 images from more than 15 important collections of cultural materials, including paintings, maps, books, sculpture, gardens, Americana, posters, fashion, and more
- Metropolitan Museum of Art - digitized high-resolution images from the museum's collections
- New York Public Library's Digital Gallery - images from the NYPL's collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, and photographs
- Rijksmuseum API Collectie - downloadable, high-resolution images of works in the museum's collection
- Smithsonian Institution Collections Online - works from the collections within the broad categories of Art & Design, History & Culture, and Science & Technology
- Wikimedia Commons - database of freely usable images and other media
Searching for images online
Better Image Searching Online
Google Advanced Image Search allows you to narrow your search by size, color, type of media, and more. You can also search for an image using another image as your search query instead of text, called a reverse image search (see below).
Other online image search engines:
Reverse Image Search
If you've found an image but forgot or don't know where it came from, try the reverse image search function on TinEye and Google Images. This allows you to upload an image and see where else it appears online.
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TinEyeTinEye uses image recognition to do a reverse image search. Upload an image and TinEye will bring up results of where else your image appears on the web.
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Google ImagesClick on the camera icon in the search box. You can do a reverse image search using a URL of a page containing the image you are searching for, or upload an image from your device or computer to search. You can refine your search using Advanced Search options in Settings.
