Image credit: si.edu/openaccess
Some 4.4 million images from the various online collections of the Smithsonian have been released for use by the public, free of charge.
The digital images that include 2D and 3D items are housed on the Smithsonian Open Access website. All are now in the public domain under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
This means that users can freely download, distribute, reuse, or modify images for commercial or personal use, without restriction. Also, no attribution is required.
However, the Smithsonian cautions that content with a CC0 license may come with other rights including that of publicity or privacy, or if the image’s use will be infringing on the laws of a particular country.
The Smithsonian first published and made available for free 2.8 million digitized images in 2020. Today, that number has passed the 4 million mark and will continue to increase as the institution continue its Open Access project.
The wide variety of images comes from the combined huge repositories of the Smithsonian’s different organizations and departments. These comprise 19 museums, nine research centers, archives, libraries, and the National Zoo.
So far since 2022, Open Access has racked up 121 million website visitors, 25.7 million media assets views, and 1.9 million media assets downloads.
It is a vast resource of images not only of national treasures but also pictures of items representing natural history, human evolution and civilization, technologies from past to present, and many more.
