LibGuides: ENGL 127 Research Writing: Social Sciences (Moreno): Find City Images

Find City Images

Great Sites and Databases for City Images

In addition to your city website and books about your city, the following may be good sources of images.

Google Arts and Culture
Harvard Digital Collections
Harvard Digital Collections provides free, public access to over 6 million objects digitized from our collections - from ancient art to modern manuscripts and audio visual materials.
UW Cities and Buildings Database
"The Cities and Buildings Database is a collection of digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world, available to students, researchers and educators on the web."
Library of Congress: Cities and Towns Collection
A wonderful collection of historical photos from many U.S. cities. All images are in the public domain, so use them freely!
NYPL Digital Collections

Google Images can be a great place to go if you want to get some idea of what sorts of images are out there, but it may be difficult to find an image that is big enough and with high enough resolution. It's possible to find that the perfect image, with little or no use restrictions, so give it a try!

Image Search: Use Advanced Image Search to find an exact size, color or type of photo or drawing.

Use the tools on the left to filter your search by subject, to include only photos with faces or to clip art, to limit by size, date of upload, and more.

For more options, click on the gear link for advanced search. It uploads your search terms and settings and gives you more options, including the option of setting copyright licensing limits.

The ideal image size for a PowerPoint presentation is above 640 x 480 pixels. The higher the resolution the better.
The width: height ratio of a PowerPoint slide is 4:3, so images with a width to height ratio of 1.33 by 1 will fill the slide area without needing cropping. Examples 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768.

Find Images in Books

Look for books of architecture, art, and urban environments in the Holman Library.

Type in your city name (or step back and search for the state/country) as Subject.

See what you find by adding the search term pictorial or images or photographs or art or architecture, etc.

Limit to Books.

Images are Intellectual Property

Give credit for them as you would for a text or data.

Here are things to keep in mind when using images downloaded from the internet:

ALWAYS credit the source of your images.
Find out if the owner/creator of an image states how their image can be used, if possible.
Whenever possible, ask the copyright holder for permission and keep a record of this correspondence.

Under Fair Use Guidelines, you may...

Use images in course assignments such as a term paper, thesis or poster as per their degree fulfillment requirements.
Publicly display images incorporated in academic work when association with courses in which they are enrolled.
Retain work in personal portfolios for use in graduate school or employment applications, for example.

and you may not...

Publish images in any work in analog or digital form that do not have proper copyright clearance. When in doubt, consult the Four Factors of Fair Use.

Find images in the public domain or licensed for reuse:

Openverse (formerly Creative Commons Search)
Creative Commons Search is now called Openverse and joins WordPress as an open source project. Openverse is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone.

Images in the public domain

A view of one of our local cities: Tacoma

Just as you would always provide in-text citation information for copied text, you must for images and photographs!

According to the OWL at Purdue, you should include the following information:

Name of image creator, A. A. (Year images was made). Title of image in italics [medium of image - i.e file type]. Retrieved from http://.....

Fig. 8. Topinka, L. [USGS/ Cascades Volcano Observatory]. (1984). Mount Rainier over Tacoma, Washington, USA. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tacoma,_Washington#mediaviewer/File:Mount_Rainier_over_Tacoma.jpg