Public.Work: A Smoothly Searchable Archive of 100,000+ “Copyright-Free” Images

We live in an age, we’re often told, when our abil­i­ty to con­jure up an image is lim­it­ed only by our imag­i­na­tion. These days, this notion tends to refer to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered sys­tems that gen­er­ate visu­al mate­r­i­al from text prompts, like DALL‑E and the many oth­ers that have pro­lif­er­at­ed in its wake. But how­ev­er tech­no­log­i­cal­ly impres­sive they are, they also reveal that our imag­i­na­tion has its lim­its, giv­ing form only to what we can put into words. To be inspired prop­er­ly again, we must explore far­ther afield, in the visu­al realms of oth­er times and places, which we can eas­i­ly do on a site like Public.work.

Jason Kot­tke describes Public.work as “an image search engine that boasts 100,000 ‘copy­right-free’ images from insti­tu­tions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple inter­face and uses AI to auto-cat­e­go­rize and sug­gest pos­si­bly relat­ed images (both visu­al­ly and con­tent-wise). And it’s fun to just visu­al­ly click around on relat­ed images.”

These jour­neys can take you from vin­tage mag­a­zine cov­ers to for­eign chil­dren’s books, life­like for­eign land­scapes to elab­o­rate world maps, Japan­ese wood­block prints to road­side Amer­i­cana — or such has been my expe­ri­ence, at any rate.

“On the down­side,” Kot­tke adds, “their sourc­ing and attri­bu­tion isn’t great — espe­cial­ly when com­pared to some­thing like Flickr Com­mons.” Accord­ing to librar­i­an Jes­samyn West, Public.work isn’t exact­ly a search engine, but an inter­face for a site called Cos­mos, which describes itself as “a Pin­ter­est alter­na­tive for cre­atives” meant to cre­ate “a more mind­ful inter­net.”

Get­ting the full sto­ry behind any par­tic­u­lar images you find there will require you to put a bit of ener­gy into research, or at least to locate the fruits of research done else­where on the inter­net. As for what you do with them, that will, of course, depend on your own cre­ative instincts. Enter Public.work here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

Cre­ative Com­mons Offi­cial­ly Launch­es a Search Engine That Index­es 300+ Mil­lion Pub­lic Domain Images

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

The Smith­son­ian Puts 4.5 Mil­lion High-Res Images Online and Into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Use

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Free: Down­load 5.3 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.