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Finding Scholarly Images

Quality, Scholarly Images for Research, Publication; Scanning Recommendations and Copyright

Quick image search

General Resources

Basic Image Collections - Everyone, regardless of topic, should consider searching these excellent image collections.

AP Images
News photos - historic and contemporary - from the Associated Press.
ARTstor
Art, architecture, photography, objects and other material culture
JSTOR
Search images within JSTOR articles - a huge group of scholarly and unique images.

TIP: Go to Advanced Search. In Advanced Search, change the "Full Text" tab to "Caption".

Duke Digital Collection
Images of objects/documents owned by Duke's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Flickr
Yahoo's image-sharing collection. Nearly 1 billion images. Searchable in any language or script. If you're looking for copyright-free flickr images, use Flickr commons https://www.flickr.com/commons

TIP: It's better to search the whole of Flickr and then limit to "Any License" tab to "Creative Commons" rather than to begin with just free-images (as many institutions recommend). Protected images on Flickr may still be able to be used, depending upon the owner.

Internet Archive - Book Images (via Flickr)
Copyright-free images from all of the scanned books in the Internet Archive.

Reverse image search and more: beyond basic Google

Find better versions of your images and search more specifically with these tools.

Google Reverse Image Search
Find better versions, different sizes, or ownership information for an image that you already have.

TIP: Click the camera icon to begin reverse image searching.

TinEye Reverse Image Search
Submit an existing image to find more information, other versions, or better quality copies.
Google Advanced Image Search
Search Google Images with more control. Try narrowing your search by size, domain or usage rights.