Digital image collections guide

"With collections concerning archaeology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, and physical anthropology, the APS is a rich resource of images depicting both the study of these disciplines and the people who practiced them."

HOLLIS Images is the Harvard Library's dedicated image catalog. It includes content from archives, museums, libraries, and other collections throughout Harvard University. It focuses on artistic and cultural materials.

"Collections Online provides access to approximately 700,000 database records and over 400,000 associated digital photographs. Users can do a quick search, a more advanced search, or browse preselected groups of commonly requested objects."

The Penn Museum online collections includes collections information, images, archival films, and more. This collection of archaeological finds and ethnographic objects documents the peoples of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.

Search over 6.4 million records with 536,000 images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives & libraries.

Anthropological fieldnotes, journals, manuscripts, photographs, moving images, sound recordings, artwork, maps and more than 60,000 digital images are described in SOVA.

"The UMMAA Image Database includes photographs from original excavations, personal collecting, reference books and magazines, as well as images of artifacts within the Museum's collections."

Use the search box to locate images from the UW-Digitized Collections. Significant collections of images are available from Africa, East/Southeast Asia, and North America. The collection also includes images of primates and other zoological specimens.

The online museum collections represent a small fraction of objects in the artifact collections held by the Wisconsin Historical Society. Collections include archaeological, cultural history, economic history, Native American ethnographic, political history, and social history materials.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

Digitized collection of images of Greek and Roman monuments from Bryn Mawr College's slide collection.

Search the image collections of more than 50 Australian libraries, museums, galleries and other cultural institutions, as well as the National Library of New Zealand. PictureAustralia searches the digitised image collections of Australia's major cultural institutions (e.g. National Library of Australia, Australian War Memorial) as well as many smaller collections.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

Browse more than 11,000 items ranging from prints and photographs to historical documents relating to African and African Diasporan history and cultures from the 17th to the 20th centuries at New York Public Library.

This collection from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries and African Studies Program offers downloadable images, sound files, and other materials on Africa drawn from contributions by UWM faculty over the last 20-30 years.

Photography of West Africa and beyond, 1840 to now: digital images of photo albums in the Carl Passavant collection, acquired during Passavant's travels in West and Central Africa, 1883-1885 and now held by the Museum der Kulturen in Basel.

A French language site offers a digital archive of postcards, as well as some photographs and engravings from all over Africa during the colonial era.

An extensive collection of travel photographs of people, landscapes, and cultural sites among the Dogon and the Lobi of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Ghana; plus images from along the Niger River in Mali. Note: individual photos are labelled, but there are no explanatory captions.

The photographs in this archive were taken in the 1930s by the late G. I. Jones and show the art of Southeastern Nigeria. The limited information provided reproduces the notes written by Jones on the photos. This archive was produced by John C. McCall in cooperation with Ursula Jones, Dept. of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University.

Another French language site offering a digital archive of over 900 postcards and other images from the colonial era in Senegal, French Soudan (Mali), Guinea, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, Dahomey (Benin), Niger, Chad, and Cameroon.

This digital collection from Northwestern University depicts the breadth of African experience; documents African life; European life in Africa in all its manifestations; and the African landscape, in particular as it changed over time. Included are photographs showing the building of East Africa’s railways, the growth of its urban centers and the development of European colonial administration. There are outstanding examples of portraiture.

An exhibition site from The British Museum about sculptures from a historical kingdom in Nigeria; includes images, historical summaries, events information, and several short videos.

This website displays a collection of ca. 1400 postcards of French West Africa created between 1900 and 1960. They were slowly gathered by the Archives nationales du Sénégal.

Explored digitized selections from an extensive archive of photographs from British colonial administrators and travellers in Africa, 1860-1960.

Online digital repository that includes materials from Francophone West Africa, Futa Jalon, Futa Toro, contemporary Senegal, and images of mosques in Bondoukou.

A comprehensive presentation of the arts of the Urhobo peoples of Nigeria, including works by contemporary Urhobo artist Bruce Onobrakpeya.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

James J. Ross Archive of African Images 1590-1920 is a database of approximately 5,000 pictures of African art published before 1921.

Over 28,000 images from the holdings of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library focusing on the countries of Asia and the Middle East.

AAA has one of the most comprehensive collections of primary and secondary source material on contemporary Asian art. The public can access over 27,000 titles, free of charge, in its collection and from its website. The secondary materials are organized into eight categories: exhibition catalogues, monographs, reference books, periodicals, audio-visuals, AAA files, invitation cards, leaflets and clippings

Art and China's Revolution was an Asia Society exhibition in 2008 about Chinese art in the 1950s-1970s. 艺术与中国革命

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is one of the largest museums in the Western world devoted exclusively to Asian art. Here, you can travel through 6,000 years of history, trek across seven major regions, and sample the cultures of numerous countries.

Images from the collections and exhibitions of the Palace Museum in Beijing. There is also an English language version of the site (accessible via the language dropdown menu).

"China: 5,000 Years" is an online version of an exhibition of Chinese art from 1850 to present created by the Guggenheim Museum in 1998.

Photos taken in the People's Republic of China March-April 1972 by William A. Joseph of Wellesley College that show daily life during the Cultural Revolution.

A virtual exhibition of a private collection of Chinese contemporary photography composed of more than 300 works by over 60 artists.

A contemporary fine-art photography magazine that includes work from Chinese photographers. Earlier content (pre-2013) is available at http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/

Search the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Images of objects from the Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries.

From the Masses to the Masses: An artist in Mao's China is a film and website about Jin Zhilin, a Chinese artist

The East Asia Image Collection (EAIC) of Lafayette College is an open-access archive of digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, rare books and slides. The collection is built around a core of visual materials from Gerald and Rella Warner, collected during their years of US State Department service in Asia (1932-1952).

A database of images and a virtual museum of Himalayan art that also includes links to related sites.

This project locates, digitalizes, archives, and disseminates online photographs from the substantial holdings of images of modern China held mostly in private hands outside that country.

An archive of Hong Kong related images that includes scenic photos, comics, pictures of pop stars, and more.

A collection of digitized posters from more than eighty countries, mainly from the twentieth century. Users can search by country.

Pictures of the oil paintings of Hu Ming from 1995 - 2016

More than 100,000 manuscripts, paintings and artifacts from Dunhaung and other Silk Road sites of the first millennium AD.

A historical collection of images from Protestant and Catholic missionary collections that record missionary activities and experiences in Africa, China, Madagascar, India, Papua-New Guinea, and the Caribbean.

An exhibition of the art being produced by artists in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and by selected artists who emigrated to the West in the late 1980s. Includes works dating from the mid-1980s to the present, in a variety of media.

An online version of the exhibition held at The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library in 1997 that featured materials produced in Shanghai from 1950-1985.

Provides access to images held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including highlights from each of the curatorial departments as well as the entire Department of European Paintings and the entire Department of American Painting and Sculpture.

Morning Sun is a film and website about the origins and history of the Cultural Revolution (c.1964-1976).

Contains images of objects from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.

An online version of a travelling exhibit that originated at Indiana University and makes use of a unique collection of posters held at the Centre for the Study of Democracy University of Westminster, London.

Online accompaniment to the exhibit "Picturing Power: Art and Propaganda in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)" held at Universitätsmuseum Heidelberg in 2001. Includes images from the exhibit as well as audio and video.

Images of Muslims and Christian missionaries working in Western China in the 1920s and 1930s form the core of this collection from Harvard University.

Scenery pictures and other pictures of China.

Explore the collections of the Shanghai Museum. There is also an English language version of the site (accessible via the language dropdown menu).

This collection includes over 5000 photographs, primarily of China in 1908-1932, taken by amateur photographer Sidney D. Gamble.

A collection of Chinese political propaganda posters assembled by historian Stefan Landsberger (Leiden University) from his own collection of over 2,000 images.

Explore the exhibitions and collections of the National Palace Museum in Taipei. There is also an English language version of the site (accessible via the language dropdown menu).

This exhibition is the first major exhibition of Taoist art in the United States, showcasing 151 works of art illustrating many facets of the Taoist religion. It includes paintings, calligraphy, sculpture, porcelain, lacquer, and ritual robes and implements.

The Tibet Album presents more than 6000 photographs spanning 30 years of Tibet's history. They also document the ways that British visitors encountered Tibet and Tibetans.

Virtual Shanghai is part of the IAO-Databases Project and contains 4,000 images (mostly before 1949).

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

The on-line journal for the study and exhibition of the arts of Asia, including exhibitions and galleries.

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is one of the largest museums in the Western world devoted exclusively to Asian art. Here, you can travel through 6,000 years of history, trek across seven major regions, and sample the cultures of numerous countries.

An online index organized by country and then city of images of historic architecture throughout Asia. Supplementary to images are maps pin-pointing the location of the buildings and a bibliography.

Images from ancient Angkor.

A Korean database of architectural and historical sites.

A photographic archive organized into four collections: architecture, sculpture, paintings and numismatics. Digital resources include maps, statistics, bibliographies, indexes, books, and other Internet resources.

The East Asia Image Collection (EAIC) of Lafayette College is an open-access archive of digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, rare books and slides. The collection is built around a core of visual materials from Gerald and Rella Warner, collected during their years of US State Department service in Asia (1932-1952).

The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art includes more than 200,000 photographs of art and architecture. The resource includes image from exhibitions and educational resources.

Asian collections from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; including magic lantern slides, historic postcards, lian huan hua (picture storybooks), South East Asia posters, and photos from Japan and China.

A Flicker site of images from the Korean War credited to the Department of Defense and individual photographers.

Site featuring image-driven scholarship: art images and photographs are introduced with essays. Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China.

Contains images of objects from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kanas City, Missouri.

Scenic Taiwan Book : 'Taiwan no fūkō' (Scenic Taiwan) 台湾の風光 is one of many photo albums published in the 1930s that depict different areas of the Japanese Empire. This particular volume includes images from Taiwan while it was under Japanese colonial rule.

The Taiwan shashinchō 台湾写真帳 (Taiwan Photograph Album) provides a window into Japanese constructions of Taiwan in the early 1910s.

This collection from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries consists of images that document early 20th century China including the the Sino-Japanese Conflict (1937-1945), a visual history of Buddhist practices and temples in China, and other images of daily life in China.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

An online index organized by country and then city of images of historic architecture throughout Asia. Supplementary to images are maps pin-pointing the location of the buildings and a bibliography.

Digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world.

The East Asia Image Collection (EAIC) of Lafayette College is an open-access archive of digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, rare books and slides. The collection is built around a core of visual materials from Gerald and Rella Warner, collected during their years of US State Department service in Asia (1932-1952).

This photo library & dictionary explores the many deities & faces of Japanese Buddhism & Shintōism. Includes 4,000+ photos of statuary from Kamakura, Nara, Kyoto, & elsewhere in Japan.

Collection of more than 7000 digitized photographs of 19th century Japan.

Explore Hiroshige's "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" composed of 118 woodblock landscape and genre scenes of mid-nineteenth-century Tokyo, held by the Brooklyn Museum.

80+ freely accessible websites sortable by format, subject and/or historical period assembled by Duke University. Formats include architecture, calligraphy, ceramics, folk arts, maps, painting, photography, postcards, posters, prints, scrolls & sculpture.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

Google Arts & Culture features content from over 1000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

These collections by Justin Kerr include The Maya Vase Database (an archive of rollout photographs) and The Pre-Columbian Portfolio (photographs of various objects).

Images from the Science Museum of Minnesota's anthropological collections.

View images from the collections and exhibitions of The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, including significant archaeological and anthropological artifacts from the pre-Columbian heritage of Mexico.

This site's galleries profile three centuries of Spanish American art, focusing on the hybridization process mixing European, native American, and even African and Asian visual cultures.

A collection of useful image databases compiled by The European Association of Mayanists, including the Waybe Drawing Archive and the Wayeb Photo Archive.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

Al-Mashriq is an online repository for cultural multimedia information from the Levant in general and Lebanon in particular.

Over 28,000 images from the holdings of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library focusing on the countries of Asia and the Middle East.

AIF's collections focus on photographic objects and documents from and related to the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora

This collection from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries contains over four thousand color slides and black and white photographs of medieval Spain taken by the late Eugene Casselman (1912-1996) during his thirty years of travel throughout the Iberian peninsula.

Highlights of the Archaeology, Fine Arts, Jewish Art and Life collections.

A kind of "photographed history book" of the state of Israel that includes photographs of events and people in the life of the country as documented by the Government Press Office photographers.

This collection houses the works of 63 photographers and more than 150,000 photographs and comprises fifty years of photographs, from the country’s birth in 1940s to 2008.

This collection portrays the Ottoman Empire during the reign of one of its last sultans, Abdul-Hamid II. The 1,819 photographs in 51 large-format albums date from about 1880 to 1893.

Collection of historical images of the Middle East. The majority of the images depict Palestine (present day Israel and the West Bank) from 1898 to 1946.

This collection from New York Public Library includes over 5,000 images showing the Middle East through early prints and photographs.

The Middle East Photograph Archive at the University of Chicago consists of over 400 photographic prints dating primarily to the second half of the nineteenth century.

A sampling of images documenting the activities of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago from 1892 to the present in the Near East.

This project is preserving Armenian History through photographs. The site includes a sample of the Armenian historical photos in their collection.

Images of Muslims and Christian missionaries working in Western China in the 1920s and 1930s form the core of this collection from Harvard University.

The RGS holds collections of photography, artwork and mapping which records over 500 years of travel, people, place, and geographical discovery from the 1480's to the present day.

A body of literature and images documenting travels during the 18th, 19th and 20th century of Europeans and Americans. Collections include historical maps and plans, and other visual materials.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

Digital images from the George Eastman collection spanning the decades from 1839 to today.

A collection of digitized posters from more than eighty countries, mainly from the twentieth century. Users can search by country.

Hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), an inventory of digital projects.

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today.

This collection from New York Public Library includes over one hundred posters.

This collection from New York Public Library features photographs from Russia and Eastern Europe.

Digital archive of photographs, negatives, prints, and glass plates showing daily life in the Soviet Union by Soviet photojournalist Semyon Fridlyand (1906-1964).

Online collection of photographs, posters, paintings, banners, sculptures, chinaware, pins, etc. relating to Stalin/ism compiled by the University of Pittsburgh.

Free, public access to over six million digital objects from Harvard Library - from ancient art to modern manuscripts and even audio/visual material.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

Over 28,000 images from the holdings of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library focusing on the countries of Asia and the Middle East.

View some images from the Alkazi Collection of Photography, consisting of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs from India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tibet, Afghanistan, China and Japan.

Find South Asian artwork, maps, photos, text, mostly from the late 1800s through early 1900s.

An online index organized by country and then city of images of historic architecture throughout Asia. Supplementary to images are maps pin-pointing the location of the buildings and a bibliography.

This digital collection from Cornell University includes 7,000 photographs of works of architecture, pilgrimage locales and domestic life taken in India and Sri Lanka.

Birla Academy of Art and Culture is a museum and art gallery in Kolkata, India.

Explore Indian art and Vedic philosophy.

A project featuring multimedia anthropological information from the Himalayan region, including maps, photos, films, music, and more.

The Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP) is among few libraries in Nepal which archives rare photos. Around 10,000 old photographs have been digitized.

A photographic archive organized into four collections: architecture, sculpture, paintings and numismatics. Digital resources include maps, statistics, bibliographies, indexes, books, and other Internet resources.

This website features a unique collection of postcards from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

Search the images and objects from London's Imperial War Museum.

This museum at Durham University is home to artworks and archaeological artefacts from the great cultures of northern Africa and Asia.

The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art includes more than 200,000 photographs of art and architecture. The resource includes image from exhibitions and educational resources.

This collection of photographic slides at the University of Pennsylvania has over 9,000 images from nearly every corner of the Indian Subcontinent taken by Mary Binney Wheeler over the course of fourteen trips.

This project features miniature paintings that often include text from Persian and Indian tales. Many of the illustrations are depictions of stories from the classical Persian text, Shahnama of Ferdowsi.

The project includes information and images related to various aspects of Indian art and culture and includes monuments, panoramic images of archaeological sites, and exhibitions.

An online version of an exhibition held at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Sponsored by the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, this site includes digital images, online audio collections, and online books.

The RGS holds collections of photography, artwork and mapping which records over 500 years of travel, people, place, and geographical discovery from the 1480's to the present day.

A collection of links to images compiled by Frances W. Pritchett. (Many links no longer lead directly to the image, but often you can conduct a search on the site to get to the image she names.)

Images of objects from the Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries.

Provides access to images highlighting several collections held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LCMA).

A virtual “home” for collecting, digitizing, and documenting various materials produced by South Asia’s exciting popular visual sphere including posters, calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings, advertisements, and other forms of street and bazaar art.

A gallery guide to South Asian Art by staff at the Smithsonian.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

Provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains over 65,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery.

This online exhibit showcases the African-American holdings at the Library of Congress. It includes links to the Frederick Douglass Papers, "From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909," and "Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860."

Browse more than 11,000 items ranging from prints and photographs to historical documents relating to African and African Diasporan history and cultures from the 17th to the 20th centuries at New York Public Library.

A companion site to the PBS series "Africans in America." It offers historical narratives, a resource bank of images and documents, and a teacher's guide.

This site provides a collection of images related to American slave trade and slave societies. The images were compiled from a variety of sources and are comprised primarily of visual documents dating to the period of slavery. The exhibit is sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and by the Digital Media Lab at the University of Virginia.

This website offers a range of primary resources, like letters, photographs, and store ledgers, to investigate life in a post-bellum southern community.

View a portfolio of 500 images documenting the social, political and cultural world of African Americans from slavery through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond.

This guide has a large number of primary source collection materials from the Library of Congress's website related to African American history, including manuscripts, newspaper articles, images, and rare books.

A digital publishing initiative that provides online access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently has sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

Jackson Davis, an educational reformer and amateur photographer, took nearly 6,000 photographs of African American schools, teachers and students throughout the Southeastern United States.

This Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture was archived around 2017. The collections of images & primary sources related to African colonization, migration, and the WPA can still be explored via the Web Archive.

This collection from Duke University consists of the contents of a photographic album entitled "Portraits of Members," containing 117 photographs of men, women, and children.

"Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans" from the Cook Collection is a digital collection of over 250 images of African Americans dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

Harvard University's collection of scarce and unique pamphlets, primarily from Chile, Cuba, Bolivia and Mexico, published during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Early photographs and prints of the New World, from Mexico to Argentina, and parts of the Caribbean from the collections of New York Public Library.

A collection of modern and contemporary art from Latin America from the University of Essex.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

This ARTstor collection of images represents American architecture from Colonial to Modern, design and decorative arts, graphic arts, Native American art objects and artifacts, more than 1,200 paintings, photography, sculpture and other media.

This ARTstor collection offers a a pictorial overview of American history, using objects from the Library of Congress's special collections. It includes prints, posters, maps, manuscript pages, photographs, designs, movie stills, cartoons, and more.

This database by the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art currently contains 1,513 images of work by 27 Inuit artists.

This ARTstor collection consists of historical photographs and drawings of Native Americans in the United States from the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

American art, craft, and design from all regions, traditions, and cultures. Searchable and browsable by artist, work type, and subject.

The image gallery contains thousands of digital reproductions of works of art held by Canada's museums.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.