Design Resources: Finding Images

Basic sources for researching topics in visual communications, interior design, and industrial design.

KU image gateway

Logo for KU Image Gateway
 

Image Gateway, Included here are licensed commercial sources, publicly available collections, and images digitized from resources in the KU libraries, museums, and academic departments. Information and terms of use for each collection is found in the listing.

ARTstor Help & Tutorial, One of the most comprehensive image resources licensed by KU is ARTstor with more than 1 million images on a wide-range of topics. This guide introduces the resource and helps users learn to find, download, save, print, organize, and share images

News images

AP images, Contains the archives of the Associated Press. New content is added constantly to news photographs, audio sound bites, and graphics spanning 180 years of history. Formerly called AccuNet/AP multimedia archive. 

Factiva, Full text coverage of newspapers, trade publications, and business publications including the Wall Street Journal. Results from topic searches may include images from Reuters Pictures and Tribune Photo Service.

General information

Images may be found in a variety of formats on publicly accessible web sites. Copyright restrictions may apply to these images, and the web master of a given site may need to be consulted when images are used.  Many large and small museums have excellent web sites which display images from their collections as well as information about the images and contacts for more assistance. The library also has many lavishly illustrated books and journals that are available for research.

Finding images on the web, A tutorial prepared at Boston Univ. that provides an excellent intorduction for image searching.

Art & design images

NYPL Digital Collections. Access to over 685,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's collections, including illuminated mauscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more. 

Image Collections and Online Art. Directory of image websites compiled by Pat Young at the University of Michigan.

Oxford Art Online. Gateway access to Grove Art Online and other Oxford art reference resources. In addition to the more than 23,000 subject entries and 21,000 biographies, the product offers 40,000 image links and 5,000 images contained within Grove Art Online.

Free Stock Photographs. An open, royalty-free gallery that contains many high resolution, free images.

Stock.xchng. High-resolution, royalty-free photos you can download and use for non-commercial purposes.

Image copyright

Artists Rights Society. The preeminent copyright, licensing, and monitoring organization for visual artists in the United States. Founded in 1987, ARS represents the intellectual property rights interests of over 50,000 visual artists and estates of visual artists from around the world (painters, sculptors, photographers, architects and others).

Copyright Crash Course. A website prepared by Georgia Harper, Office of General Counsel at the University of Texas, outlining some of the legal issues regarding copyright and fair use.