Explore the Newly-Launched Public Domain Image Archive with 10,000+ Free Historical Images

We’ve often fea­tured the work of the Pub­lic Domain Review here on Open Cul­ture, and also var­i­ous search­able copy­right-free image data­bas­es that have arisen over the years. It makes sense that those two worlds would col­lide, and now they’ve done so in the form of the just-launched Pub­lic Domain Image Archive (PDIA). The Pub­lic Domain Review invites us to use the site to “explore our hand-picked col­lec­tion of 10,046 out-of-copy­right works, free for all to browse, down­load, and reuse” — and note that the num­ber will grow, giv­en that “this is a liv­ing data­base with new images added every week.”

As with any por­tal of this kind, you can browse by cat­e­go­ry tags, the selec­tion of which includes every­thing from archi­tec­ture to dec­o­ra­tions to occultism to war. But if you’d like to get a sense of the sheer for­mal, aes­thet­ic, cul­tur­al, and his­tor­i­cal vari­ety of the PDIA, you might con­sid­er tak­ing a first look through its “infi­nite view,” which allows you to scroll in all direc­tions through a lim­it­less labyrinth of copy­right-free won­ders: adver­tise­ments, Bib­li­cal scenes, old-time sports­men, out­er-space pho­tos, mush­rooms, medieval musi­cal crea­tures, let­ter­forms, and, well, labyrinths.

You might also rec­og­nize items you’ve seen here on Open Cul­ture before, like the nature draw­ings of Ernst Haeck­el, the mod­ern art-lam­poon­ing chil­dren’s book The Cubies’ ABC, or the ghosts and mon­sters illus­trat­ed by ukiyo‑e mas­ter Hoku­sai. The PDIA pro­vides more con­text than some pub­lic-domain image archives, even link­ing to rel­e­vant Pub­lic Domain Review posts, where you can read about such top­ics as Emi­ly Noyes Vanderpoel’s col­or analy­sis charts (which also inspired a post of ours), the end of books (as pre­dict­ed in 1894), and even “Cats and Cap­tions before the Inter­net Age.” Hav­ing fall­en into the pub­lic domain, all this mate­r­i­al is, of course, avail­able to use for any pur­pose you like — includ­ing just sat­is­fy­ing your own curios­i­ty.

Relat­ed com­ments:

The New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 860,000 His­tor­i­cal Images: Down­load Medieval Man­u­scripts, Japan­ese Prints, William Blake Illus­tra­tions & More

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Pub­lic Domain: A Deep­er Dive Into the Col­lec­tion

Public.Work: A Smooth­ly Search­able Archive of 100,000+ “Copy­right-Free” Images

Sea-Ser­pents, Vam­pires, Pirates & More: The Pub­lic Domain Review’s Sec­ond Book of Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.