Online Image Banks

Art Institute Chicago. Collections.
The Art Institute Chicago’s online collections offers access to over 77,000 works, including basic information about works of art. There are a variety of filters to help teachers explore themes, browse images a-z, search the online collection, and search interpretive resources. In addition, teachers may create “My Collections,” an individualized online gallery that may be shared with students and teachers. 

Google Arts & Culture
Google Arts & Culture is an online platform through which the public can view high-resolution images and videos of artworks and cultural artifacts from partner cultural organizations throughout the world.

California State University. World Images Kiosk.  
The World Image Kiosk contains approximately 100,000 images, with nine hundred portfolios, from California State University’s IMAGE project. Spanning across multiple disciplines, the online database has a keyword search in addition to portfolios organized alphabetically that might be useful teachers planning units.

Creative Commons
“Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.” This site is a gateway to approved images hosted on other web pages such as Google and Flickr. 

Corbis Images. Fine Art Collection. 
Corbis Image’s online database includes a collection of more than one million images. Corbis’s collection includes historical and editorial images from photojournalists, fine arts museums, and cultural institutions in addition to creative royalty-free images.  

The J Paul Getty Trust. Explore the Collection. 
There are many ways to search the Getty’s digitized collection from this link: by object type, medium, topic, theme, or keyword. You can also explore the 3,325 artworks curated for the Google Art Project.

The Library of Congress. Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. 
The Library of Congress has an online catalog of prints and photographs. It has a keyword search in addition to collections organized by topics that might be useful teachers planning units.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Collection Online. 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently (May 2014) released nearly 400,000 high- resolution images of their collection to the public. The collection can be searched by artist, medium or even era.

Smithsonian Library. Galaxy of Images.                                                                                                 Ranging from art to zoology, the Smithsonian’s digitized collection may be search by keyword, taxonomic (scientific) word, author, topic, or theme. Uniting twenty libraries into one system, this online image resource samples from more than 1.5 million printed books.