Finding Images

There are many excellent online resources for still images, some to which the University subscribes and others which are openly accessible online. The University of Birmingham also has an incredibly rich variety of cultural assets and collections on campus, some of which are digitized and may be accessed, with permission, by approaching the relevant institution.

Remember wherever you source your image you must always use a  sufficient acknowledgement this should include the artist/author, the title of the work and the image source. See the Copyright and Referencing your images tabs for more details.

The University of Birmingham subscribes to the following image collections:

• The Barber Institute
  The Barber Institute contains one of the finest small collections of European art in the UK. The collection includes prime examples of the work of many of the greatest artists including Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, Veronese, Rubens, Van Dyck, Poussin, Claude, Gainsborough, Turner, Ingres, Manet, Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Magritte.

• The University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections
  A cornucopia of extraordinary artefacts, including treasures such as West African masks, Pop Art prints, celestial globes, 19C medical waxes and historic scientific instruments. The Campus Collection of Fine and Decorative Art represents a wide range of artistic genres from historic portraits through to 1960s Birmingham School and finally to the work of contemporary artists. Highlights include David Prentice, Peter Lanyon, John Bratby, Sonia Lawson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Barbara Hepworth among many others.
• Lapworth Museum of Geology 
  The finest and most extensive collections of fossils, minerals and rocks in the region.
• Cadbury Research Library (CRL) 
  The University’s Special Collections consist of over 120,000 pre-1850 books dating from 1471 and over 3 million archives and manuscripts. In addition the CRL houses the University’s own heritage archive collection.

Museums, galleries and libraries

• Art UK
  Art UK is the successor to Your Paintings. It is a joint initiative between the Public Catalogue Foundation (now known as Art UK), 3,000 museums and other art collections, and the BBC. 
   
• Digital Bodleian
  Digitised books, manuscripts and maps from the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
   
• Pre-Raphaelite collection
  Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery's  Pre-Raphaelite collection has been made available online.
   
• Wellcome Images
  Wellcome Images is a world-class collection relating to biomedical science and its history. website.
   
• The Imperial War Museum
  Covers all aspects of twentieth and twenty-first century conflict involving Britain, the Commonwealth and other former empire countries. They were intended to record the 'toil and sacrifice' of every individual affected by war.
   
• The British Library
  The British Library is a major research library, with items in many formats, both print and digital: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings.The BL also shares images of its collection through Flickr Commons.
   
• The National Gallery
  The National Gallery houses the national collection of paintings in the Western European tradition from the 13th to the 19th centuries.
   
• Tate
  Tate holds the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art

General collections

• VADS: the online resource for visual arts A portfolio of visual art collections of over 100,000 images, freely available and copyright cleared for use in teaching, learning and research in the UK

• Bibliothèque nationale de France
  The Bibliothèque nationale de France collects, preserves and makes available French national documentary heritage. 

• The Getty
  The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles houses European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, and photography from its beginnings to the present, gathered internationally. 
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art creates, organizes, and disseminates a broad range of digital images documenting the rich history of the Museum, its collection, exhibitions, events, people, and activities. Many of these images are available for personal enjoyment, study, educational purposes, and scholarly publication.
• NASA image and Video Library
  NASA has extensive image and video galleries online, including historic images, current missions, astronomy pictures, and ways to search for NASA images. Generally, each mission and program has a video and image collection on the topic page.

• Flickr
  Flickr primarily hosts amateur photography and institutional photography, much of it freely available to use. It is a great resource for finding contemporary images of people, places, buildings, and events.  Images are available under Creative Commons licensing.
• Flickr Commons
  Flickr Commons is made up of public photography archives from major institutions. The Commons was launched in 2008 as a collaboration with the Library of Congress, and has since expanded to include institutions such as The Imperial War Museum, the George Eastman House, and the New York Public Library. Users are invited to help describe the works, thus making the collections richer and easier to search. Images in the Commons have no known copyright restrictions.

• TinEye - Reverse Image Search
  If you have an image, but you are not sure what it is try TinEye , a reverse image search engine which allows you to upload an image and then searches the internet for other instances of that image.