Inside Out Library
The largest searchable collection of illustrations cut out of public-domain books: 2,343,477 pictures from 72,757 books. Describe what you want, or search with a picture. Every image is free to use, rights-checked, and linked to the book it came from.
Old books are full of beautiful, strange, interesting illustrations, diagrams, and photographs. But unless you know which book to open, a lot of those pictures are hard to find. Each picture here can be discovered on its own, but it always has a path back to the book it came from.
Where the pictures come from
- Archive.org
- British Library
- Heidelberg University Library
- National Diet Library
- E-rara
- Wellcome Collection
- Met's Watson Library
- Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
- The New York Public Library
- Library of Congress
- E-codices
- Getty Museum
- Science History Institute
- Wikimedia Commons
Questions
Can I use these pictures commercially?
Yes. Every picture is checked against its library’s rights statement before it is admitted (public domain, the Public Domain Mark, or no known copyright restrictions), so there is no permission to ask, no credit required, and commercial use is included.
Do I need an account, or to pay?
No. There is no account, no watermark and no paid tier. Download saves a copy of any picture, and each one links to its book at the library that scanned it.
How do I search?
Describe what you are looking for in plain words — “a hot air balloon”, “a cross-section of a steam engine” — and the search matches what the pictures look like, not only their captions. You can also drop in or paste a picture to find others like it, or narrow by date, color and kind (photograph, illustration, diagram, ornament).
Where do the pictures come from?
From books scanned by the Internet Archive, the British Library, Wellcome Collection, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Met’s Watson Library, the Science History Institute, Heidelberg University Library, the Getty, e-codices and others. Each picture names its book and its library.
How is it different from Wikimedia Commons or the British Library’s Flickr collection?
Those are vast, and mostly found by keyword or by luck. Old Book Illustrations and the Public Domain Review are hand-picked and much smaller; museum open-access collections show objects rather than the pages of books; archive.org has the books themselves, but as whole scanned pages. Here every picture is cut out of its page, there are well over a million of them, and you can search them by what they show.
Get in touch
Write to hello@insideoutlibrary.com. Inside Out Library is a one-person project, built and paid for by Lokesh Dhakar, and it will stay free.