Online Reference Shelf--Images
Search Strategies | Finding Images in
Reference Tools You Should Know About | Bay Area Photography Collections | Bay Area Museums
Image Search Engines
| Art | Nature
| Science | News
Line Drawings | Clip Art | Maps | Unique Web Sites
Copyright and Images: What
You Need to Know | Glossary of Terms
This Library Research Guide will help you find a specific image to draw attention to, or help explain what you are saying in your paper or thesis. Your search can include pictures of paintings, sculptures, photographs, cartoons, clip art, multimedia and video. On and off-the-Web search strategies and some of the best Internet image search engines and sites are listed below. Note: Always look for permission from the web page's author or institution before using an image for a paper, online presentation, or web page. Sometimes permission will be granted on the web page itself, especially for clip art.
ONLINE SEARCH STRATEGIES
|ARTISTIC MOVEMENT & STYLE||
Leonardo Da Vinci
Vincent Van Gogh
These words describe exactly what you are looking for. They are called "subject headings" or "descriptors" or "key words."
This will only bring back pages with the words "mona lisa" or "monalisa" associated with an image as in the name of an image file. Retrieving that file might also retrieve the image itself.
If not successful, try again using
slightly different and creative wording.
Image: "miners hat"
Image: "hard hat" and mines
You can also shorten your descriptors to catch variants of words. For instance, if you are looking for pictures of children playing, you would might want to search for images using the words children, children’s, child, child’s as well as for the words playing and play. To catch all of these words in one search, you can use the * symbol, like this:
This will find all images that have a name beginning with "child" and with "play" that the search engine has indexed.
Some search engines don’t have the
ability to search for text in image file names. In this case you can work
with the knowledge that most image files end with the string ".gif" or
"jpg". You could search for:
IMAGE SEARCH ENGINES
PHOTO AND MEDIA FINDER
This site has over 17 million searchable images, audio clips and video files from the web and private collections.
This is an exceptionally large, well-indexed collection of more than 2 million top quality online photos and artworks from a variety of perspectives, eras, and geographical regions. News, celebrity and special collections are also available. The “Art” section includes fine arts, digital art, and advertising arts. “Collections” includes “Incredible Landscapes,” “Vintage Advertising,” “Kid Pix,” “Classic B&W,” “Ansel Adams,” and more. Corbis offers excellent thumbnail images for free. Larger framed or unframed images at cost from $16.95 to $89.95. Click on Personal Shopping for pictures for your home or office. Business Communication gives you presentations images and templates. None of these images can be used for publication without copyright permission (such as placing on a web page).
This new picture and image search engine is simple, fast and accurate to use. Picsearch uses indexing algorithms to insure improved search relevancy. Filtering systems are used to screen out offensive materials. Web page organization is easy to follow. Be sure to use the “advanced interface” to search ALL images.
THE HUMAN INTERNET
This extraordinary search site searches for clip art, fine art resources, online museums, galleries, photographs, multimedia and streaming video. There is an excellent list of specialized image search engines for finding fine art, graphics, photography, images.. On the About.com home page, search for “image search engines.” Click on “Image Search Engines and Directories.”
Over 37,000 photographs of landscape, nature, animals, buildings, etc. of California. From UC Berkeley. Use of thumbnails is free for personal and nonprofit use as long as you credit the photographer and contributing organization. For more information, look at their "Using the Photos" page
Search through more than 80,000 images, current pictures and vintage illustrations.
Contents include images from Aircraft, to American Cities to Famous Actors and Actresses of the 20th Century to Paintings and Famous Works of Art to World War II. This is a great map source for continents, countries and the 50 states.
Links provided to 14 image search machines including the Library of Congress, NASA Ames Research Center, Smithsonian Institution and WebSeek.
This image search engine offers a comprehensive index of Web indexers .It presents results as thumbnail pictures – nine to 15 images per page, your choice.
Offers more than 75,000 high resolution, downloadable images, available free for personal use, or a flat-fee for commercial or Web use. Copyright permission required
Searchable database covers Animals and Pets; Art & Architecture; Culture & Communities; Entertainment; History; Leisure & Recreation; Nature & Environment; People & Relationships; Sports & Outdoors; Transportation; Travel & Geography.
FINDING ART IMAGES
of the image collections on the Web are made available by the museums that
own the originals, so it can be helpful to know where the original work
is. If you do know where the original is, try looking for the museum in
: Web Directories for Museums and Galleries at:
Artcyclopedia is a great starting point for finding museum-quality art on the Web. Search by artist and you get a list of links to museums with digital images of that artist. Monthly features highlight artists, museums, and more. Copyright Protected.
ImageBase is a well-indexed, searchable image and text database of 75,000 objects from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
WIDE ART RESOURCES
WWAR is an index of art resources on the web, searchable by artists’ names, museum names, exhibition titles or subject
The SUNET Archive is an online archive of hundreds of famous paintings, mostly Western. There is one directory per artist, listed by the artist’s FIRST name. There are a few images in each directory, but this is in no way a comprehensive collection of paintings.
OF ART – WWW VIRTUAL LIBRARY
This site from the Computers and History of Art (CHArt) has a special focus on the academic study of Art History. It offers a collection of links relating to art history and computer application in Art History. A very useful directory of reference sites, research tools, libraries is also available here.
ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO'S THINKER IMAGE DATABASE
This imagebase indexes more than 15,000 artists represented in more than 60,000 works.
The J. Paul Getty Art Education Web Site (Getty ArtsEdNet) offers access to art images by artist, title, date or by gallery or exhibition.
This is an amazing website. Just enter artist’s name and you get a biography, image gallery, books and periodical articles on the artist, museums and current exhibitions and even auction records. Wow!
MUSEUM OF ART
Two million works of art from all parts of the compass, ancient through modern times.
A treasure trove of 100,000 slides belonging to the Jacques-Edouard Berger Foundation, devoted to art, and including the main civilizations, such as Egypt, China, Japan, India, Europe.
EXHIBITIONS AND ARCHIVES
Bengt’s Photo Page has links to current photo exhibitions and archives. And to important societies, associations and clubs
Here are some of the sites found by the Internet portals listed above. Photos may be copied or inserted. You may search for images by subject. No fee is charged.
Searchable photo database offers photos in 29 categories covering animals, landscapes, famous locations, plants.
More than 19,000 animal photos, available for personal or educational use. Be sure to click on "images".
FISH AND WILD LIFE SERVICE
Sampling of images from the National Image Library at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Subjects include fish, wildlife, plants, scenics, habitat issues. All images are free but you must credit the photographer and the U.S. Fish And Wildlife Service.
AND MAMMAL IMAGES
Photos of 756 species of birds and many large mammals. Copyright protected.
Collection of animal images.
Brief information and pictures to print out for almost 100 animals.
The Canadian Museum of Natural History provides brief information and drawings for almost 250 animals and mammals.
A searchable database of over 7,000 color flower photographs. On Flowerweb.com homepage, click on "Flowerbase" in green section to left of the frame. Enter flower you want to find in the search box.
This web site is an attempt to bring as many of NASA’s still images as possible to one location. It is not a unified searchable database, though some of these collections have search capability. Collections include: Astronomy, Earth, Oceanography, Robotics, Solar System, Space Shuttle photos and Flight Vehicles. Copyright protected.
NASA IMAGE EXCHANGE
From spectacular pictures of the earth to shots of distant galaxies, this image-specific search engine sifts through databases of over 300,000 NASA images.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has gathered more than 10,000 images of nature. You’ll find far more than just fish and weather balloons here. Photo Albums include sunrises, sunsets, moonbeams, coral reefs, dolphins, seals and coastlines.
Offers Galileo, Hubble Space Telescope and Voyager photos of solar system planets, asteroids, stars, nebulae, the sun and of various spacecraft.
One of the Web’s largest collections of color photographs taken through an optical microscope (commonly referred to as "photo-micro-graphs"). Click on "galleries" then on "Photo Gallery.’
FROM HISTORY OF MEDICINE
60,000 images illustrate the social and historical aspects of medicine.
Time, Inc. has placed hundreds of thousands of photographs from its collection of more than 20 million photos taken since the 1930’s for its publications online. Easy to conduct fast, thorough searches.
NEWS: IMAGE GALLERY
Look here for photos of top news stories of the day.
A collection of 500 digital images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and through the world.
SLIDE LIBRARY (SPIRO)
Search architecture slide library from Berkeley by period, topic, subject, building or object.
ANIMATED GIF LIBRARY
Over 30,000 original animations and designs for use on web pages, in email and presentations
800 caricatures of rock stars, movie stars, sports stars, and others, free for use on personal web pages.
Largest searchable cartoon database on the web. A source for copyrighted New Yorker Magazine cartoons.
This site contains more than 2,500 Western signs, arranged into 54 groups according to their graphic characteristics. Their histories, uses, and meanings are thoroughly discussed. The signs range from ideograms carved in mammoth teeth by Cro-Magnon men, to hobo signs and subway graffiti.
Note: Many of these clipart sites may open many advertising windows. To keep your computer from freezing, have as few programs running when navigating through these sites. Also, make an effort to close advertising windows immediately before they build up.
Pages and pages of clipart organized under thirty categories. This is an excellent source.
The pages listed in this directory usually have some type of copyright permission granted for personal use (sometimes nonprofit use as well). Make sure you look at the web site that contains the actual image itself, first (sometimes there are conditions).
WEB PAGE DESIGN AND LAYOUT - GRAPHICS
Here are links to over 130 sites organized alphabetically and also under six headings: Animated GIFs, Backgrounds, Clip Art, Icons, Transparent Images, Web Site Templates.
Here’s the best site to create buttons with the text you want on them. Most clipart sites offer only custom made buttons, which can be corny or gimmicky. Better yet, no ads here.
A huge collection of animated clip art.
FREE CLIP ART
A solid source for thousands of graphics. Pick your category from the menu on the left—buttons, people, sports, food and more. Just click to find image after image.
PLACES CLIP ART SEARCHER
1.2 million clip art, icons, images, sounds are available from Anzwers.com, Hotbot.com, Lycos.com and 1-Click.com.
Animation Factory's Media Builder offers 20,000 free animated GIFs, icons, lines, borders, backgrounds and fonts.
This site features more than 300,000 free WEB graphic as well as links to other free graphic sites.
WEB GRAPHICS ARCHIVE
One of the largest collections of free web graphics on the internet including 10,000 arrows. Lines, buttons, balls, clipart and icons.
Select from 3,600 backgrounds for use in your Web page design and development projects.
CLIP ART SERVER
Barry’s Clip Art Server is an award winning, free resource for all tyes of clipart. New images added daily.
Offers thousands of clipart graphics, backgrounds, icons and animations to incorporate in WEB page design. Most images are sci-fi or fantasy.
A densely packed page with links to hundreds of free clipart sites, and "more clipart sites."
Innovative, customized search form designed specifically to locate clip art, icons, backgrounds, bullets, lines, buttons and other graphics. Searches links from Anzwers, Lycos, Hotbot, and 1-Click search engines.
An awesome map collection and free cartographic images. Collection is part of the WorldAtlas.com website
IMPORTANT NOTE: Many maps and atlases depicting historical events, demographics, societal trends, and more, are available at Chabot College’s Online Reference Shelf then on Geography and Countries
UNIQUE WEB SITES
Over 30,000 animations and web designs for use on web pages, email and presentations are organized under 36 categories.
Free for personal use
Here are live shots, not graphics. Links to cameras set up all over the world are listed under 14 major categories. See the world as it is this very moment at beaches, restaurants, offices, newsrooms, schools, roads, even a Las Vegas wedding chapel.
Make your own image. This free online service provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.
If you want to polish your graphics skills, check out this great site which has lots of tutorials for Paint Shop Pro. What you learn can be used on the web and in print work.
To find illustrated books by subject, pictures of the work you are looking for may be in an anthology containing the works of many artists. Use the artist’s last name or the type of image desired in the library book catalog:
Another way to find books that may have pictures or illustrations for your subject, is to search in the online catalog for books that have "illustrations," "color plates," "photographs," or "pictorial works" listed in the catalog description. To do this, you would enter your subject and either "ill," (illustrations are abbreviated in the catalog description) "print," "phogotraph," "pictorial works," "picture" or "drawing." MAKE SURE YOU CLICK ON THE KEYWORD BUTTON (not SUBJECT).
mammals AND color plates
nature AND pictorial works
architecture AND ill
REFERENCE TOOLS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT
Here are a few examples of the tools found in library reference collections to find in "hunt and peck" image searches.
Periodicals Communication Arts
Ref N31.E4833 Encyclopedia of World Art
Ref N31-I47 Illustrated Encyclopedia of Western Art
Ref N31.J32 Color Encyclopedia of World Art
Ref QL3 Illustrated Encyclopedia of Animal Kingdom
Ref TR9 Illustrated Encyclopedia of Photography
Ref Z118.S82 Graphic Arts Encyclopedia
BAY AREA PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTIONS
20,000 photographs owned by the San Francisco Library cover the city’s past and present. Click on "San Francisco Historical Photography Collection" if you're on a page to different selections of San Francisco Public Library
SCIENCES AND MAP LIBRARY
Selected images from aerial photography are available line. Links to geography, geophysics and cartography sites are provided.
BAY AREA MUSEUMS
Museums are excellent sources for
images and for background research. Museums house collections and
sponsor exhibitions comprised of photography, prints and drawings, film
and video, paintings and sculpture. Museums typically involve artists,
academicians, community activists in talks, classes, workshops, teaching
tours, and readings. Museum book stores offer very unique, related educational
materials, replicas and books for sale. The Chabot College handout "BAY
AREA MUSEUMS" lists website addresses and describes the major San Francisco
Bay Area museums. The San Francisco Public Library has a more comprehensive
listing of Bay Area museums in their Art and Music Center,
NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
is critical that you know that any use of an image you did not create requires
permission from its owner. You do not create an image by scanning it from
a book or magazine. That is copying, and it is illegal if you do not have
It is not possible to make a categorical
statement about copyright which covers all the pictures and other visual
resources found on the Internet. If you wish to use images, inquire about
the copyright status of the individual image. This information is almost
always available at the web site where the graphic materials are found.
Knowingly or unknowingly violating copyright notice can put you at
The copyright statements below offer a typical, generalized perspective of graphic copyright terms and conditions. The statements have been compiled from the terms described at ten major Internet image collection sites.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL PROVIDED BY OTHERS AND USED WITH PERMISSION
"FREE" WEB GRAPHICS AND LINKING IMAGES.
Graphic images provided by "free" or "linkware" graphics sites are not public domain. These images, although provided to you for "free" (no money involved) are not being given to you in ownership. You are being allowed to use them if you comply with the owner’s terms and conditions.. Make sure that you comply with the owner’s terms and conditions. Make sure that you comply with the owner's terms and conditions in full when you use or display the graphics in question. If the owner says "don’t alter it", don’t alter it. If the owner says, only use for your personal homepage," only use it for your personal homepage. All the free images are for display purposes only and may not, under any circumstances, be sold, altered, or used for any type of personal or commercial gain. You may not display any graphics in any other graphic collection. The same applies to linking images or logos. They are still copyrighted by the owner and are usually only to be used for links to the owner’s web site. Again, in these cases the "C" symbol at the bottom of your web site only pertains to the content that you yourself created, not to the logos provided to you for links or the "free" graphics loaned to you to decorate your web pages.
THREE TYPICAL COPYRIGHT LICENSING TIERS:
WEB SITE LICENSE.You can use visual materials in a noncommercial presentation as well as in a non-commercial WEB site. All the free images are for display purposes on websites and personal computers only, and may not, under any circumstances, be sold altered, or used for any type of personal or commercial gain. You may not display graphics in any other graphics collections or off the Internet in any way, shape or form.
PRESENTATION LICENSE. A presentation is a personal or business presentation that you prepare and present for yourself or on behalf of your company, which conveys ideas and presents facts, opinions and information to others. You may use, present and distribute your presentations containing visual materials to others via computer (but not via the WWW or Internet), removable storage media or CD-ROM, so long as the visual material is contained only in your presentation and is clearly not intended to be downloaded or copied by users on a stand alone basis. Cartoon use is restricted. You may use a cartoon in a single presentation for up to one year. You must then renew the license for subsequent years or for any additional presentation you create. Cartoons and captions may not be cropped, altered or modified. No colorization is permitted. The trademark notice of the company renting the material to you must appear.
PRINT USE LICENSE For photographs, photo object and templates, a license generally grants you uses permitted under both the presentation and Website licenses plus uses in advertising, editorials, catalogs, brochures, reports, disposable packaging, book covers and educational text books. Typical licenses also allow you to use the image in screen savers, wall paper, electronic greeting cards, web sites, broadcast video, multimedia presentations and CD-ROMS, provided that the visual vendor materials is at a resolution not greater than 600 by 800 pixels and is incorporated into a design in such a fashion that it is clearly not intended to be downloaded or copied on a stand alone basis. Cartoons may be used in up to 1,000 printed newsletters, presentations or reports. After 1,000 uses, the licensing must be renewed.
|Clip-Art||Electronic illustrations that can be inserted into a document. Many clip-art packages are available some general and others specialized for a particular field. Most clip-art packages provide the illustrations in several file formats so that you can insert them into various word-processing systems.|
|Compression||The process of reducing the size of a file; see also lossy compression and lossless compression.|
|DPI||Dots Per Inch (also Pixels Per Inch), the number of dots or pixels in one inch.|
|Flashpix||New format provides much higher-resolution images in a way that allows speedy network delivery.|
|GIF||Graphic Interchange Format, a common Web 8-bit image format by Compuserve that can hold 256 shades of color or gray. Good for text and line art. Not good for full-color pictures.|
|Icon||A small picture that represents an object or program. Icons are very useful in computer applications that use windows, because with the click of a mouse button you can shrink an entire window into a small icon.. (This is sometimes called minimizing.) To redisplay the window, you merely move the pointer to the icon and click a mouse button. (This is sometimes called restoring or maximizing).|
|JPEG||Joint Photographic Engineers Group, a compression scheme for the JPEG File Format (JFIF), a common Web image format. Good for full-color pictures. Not good for text or line art|
|.JPG||If you only want images, try just looking for images files ending in ".jpg." jpg images are likely to be larger than .gif images because .jpg images don’t take up as much computer memory; they lose a little quality in the process, but not usually enough to notice with the naked eye.|
|Logo||Stands for "logotype," an identifying symbol, as for in advertising.|
|Lossless Compression||A file compression scheme that does not throw away image information in the process|
|Lossy Compression||A file compression scheme that throws away image information in the process, thereby Compression leading to a degraded image.|
|MPEG||Moving Pictures Experts Group sets standards for compressing and storing video, audio and animation in digital form. The standards set by this group include: MPEG-1 is a standard for CD-ROM video and audio. MPEG-2 is a standard for full-screen, broadcast quality video. MPEG-3 is a standard for CD-quality music and MPEG-4 is a standard for video telephony.|
|Multimedia||Refers to the simultaneous use of more than one type of media such as text with sound, moving or still images with music.|
|Pixel||"Picture element," the smallest addressable component of an image; one "dot".|
|PNG||Portable Network Graphics is replacing the GIF format to offer more capabilities.|
|Resolution||The number of pixels in a given area (the more dots or pixels the higher the resolution). Usually described as dots per inch (dpi) or pixels per inch (ppi).|
|RGB||Red, green, blue, the three additive colors that go into making up a full-color image on screen.|
|Streaming||Streaming data refers to multimedia files, such as video clips and audio, that begin Media playing seconds after it is received by your computer from the World Wide Web. The Media is delivered in a "stream" from the server so that you don’t have to wait several minutes or longer to download multimedia files.|
|Thumbnail||A small version of an image, usually no more than 2" on a side, used for previewing a larger image.|
|TIFF||Tagged Image File Format, a standard image file format that can be used with or without compression. Most often is used to save master versions of images.|
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