Paris Musées makes over 62,000 of historic photos copyright free and available online

If you enjoy historic photos and need them for any purpose, here’s a real gem. Paris Musées has just launched an online collection with more than 100,000 digital reproductions of classic artwork. Among them, there are 62,500 photos, all of them scanned in high-resolution and publicly accessible under a CC0 license.

The Paris Musées’ Collections portal contains masterpieces of world-famous artists such as Rembrandt, Gustave Courbet, and Eugène Delacroix. When it comes to photographers, there are many scanned prints by Eugène Atget, the French photographer who documented Paris in the late 19th and early 20th century. You’ll also find works by photographers such as Pierre Emounts ou Emonds, Ernest Charles Appert, Hippolyte Blancard and Roger Henrard.

As I mentioned, all works in the gallery are listed under a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license and they’re available as high-res files. Paris Musées promises that it will also include works that are still in copyright and they’ll be available in low resolution.

Paris Musées is a public institution that manages all museums in Paris. They said that they had a large number of inquiries from researchers, students, and educators who wished to view or use the work in the museums’ collections. “We are ensuring they can easily, enduringly, freely and instantly use High Definition images to support their research, their teaching and their publications, thereby improving their physical and digital cultural mediation tools,” Paris Musées said when announcing the collection.

I browsed the gallery for “Serbie” and the results gave me chills. I’ve found plenty of photos from the First World War, as well as other photos from Serbia or related to Serbia in any way. Take a look at a few of them below:

If you’d like to check out what the gallery offers, you can visit it here and browse through the photos and other art. And if you want to see more of amazing image, book and sound collections, take a look at some of these, too:

• Europeana Photography Collection
• The Met Museum online gallery
• Arab Image Foundation gallery
• Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection
• NASA image gallery
• American Museum of Natural History Research Library
• The Guggenheim Museum online archive (books)
• BBC Archive (sound samples)

[via DPReview; lead images by Eugène Atget (left 1904, right 1899)]