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. The featured images each link to the relevant article on the PDR where one can read about the stories which surround the works. Visitors in search of more context will, of course, also find links back to the institutions where we found the images — from small college libraries to national repositories.

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.

And with more ways to visualise the collection to come.

Many of the images in the PDIA are also available to purchase as high-quality prints. Expanding upon the 900 or so prints already available in the PDR Print Shop, the PDIA now offers several thousand images ready to adorn your walls.

Whether you’re a researcher, an artist, a designer, or simply a lover of old images, we hope you find the PDIA to be a source of inspiration and delight. Explore, download, and create to your heart’s content!

Finally, it is of vital importance that we bring this new project to you for free as we believe in a cultural commons where public domain works are accessible to all. It is, however, a costly undertaking. With no external funding or intrusive advertising, we rely on the generous support of our readers, and we’d like to say a huge thank you, again, to the Friends of the Public Domain Review, each of whose annual donation has made this all possible. However, we do need more help to keep this going. If you haven’t joined up as a Friend yet, please do consider it, and of course one-off donations are also very welcome. Visit our support page.