Public Domain Image Archive Launches with More than 10,000 Out-of-Copyright Historical Images

After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse.

While The Public Domain Review primarily takes the form of an “arts journal”, it has also quietly served as a digital art gallery, albeit one fractured across essays and collections posts. The PDIA sets out to emphasise this visual nature of the PDR, freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation. Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture.

A valuable image archive in its own right, offering hand-picked highlights from hundreds of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, the PDIA also functions as a database of images featured in the PDR, offering an image-first approach to exploring the project’s content.

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We intend the archive to be a place of discovery, and to this end have developed various “views” to aid exploration:

• catalogue view, to search and browse by theme, style, date, and more;
• infinite view, for a more immersive experience of the collection;
• shuffle view, a tool to easily summon images in a serendipitous manner.

Learn More, Read the Complete Blog Post

Direct to Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA)