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

Find Cities & Urban Architectural Images

The Web is a great place to find images of your architectural site. Here are a few important search tips and tools:

Be sure to caption your images and include them in your works cited.
- A URL link is not a caption. A caption will include a title/ brief description and source.
While you can use any images you find online in your student work as long as you give credit to the creator and host, try using images that are in the public domain or that have a creative commons license that permits reuse.

Go to the city government website to find high quality images.
Go to the website for your building/architectural site to find high quality images.
Go to Google Images to search for high quality images.
1. Under tools, select usage rights and creative commons. It cuts down on the number of images you will see, but these images are free for you to reuse. Please give credit.

Illustration of Image Search limited to Creative Commons (click on images to enlarge):

Step 1: Search Google Images

Step 2: Limit at Tools and Usage Rights to Creative Commons Images

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

Google Arts and Culture
CURIOSity Digital Collections (Harvard)
Harvard Library's CURIOSity 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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