This hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works is a living antidote to AI.

Since 2011, Editor and publisher Adam Green has been labouriously exploring forgotton visual treasures and curious images to publish in a online journal –  The Public Domain Review (PDR), contextualiseing compelling and images from a diverse range of cultures.

The collection, selected from the hundreds of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums sharing their collections online has quietly grown into a vast yet easily accessable resource of out-of-copyright material, now fully in the public domain and has subsequently promoted the recent launch of The Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA).  

With a focus on the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful; think of it as a “best of” – an curated exhibition at the entrance to an immense network of archives that lie beyond with a simple interface thats help visitors explore.

The Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA) displays well over 10,000 meticulously tagged and categorised items that users can explore the website in multiple ways. The vast ‘infinite view’ launches a 360-degree scrollable layout, while ‘shuffle view’generates random combinations of images. Users can also simply search by era, theme, style, or colour.

With image-sharing becoming such a huge part of how we socialise online, both the PDR and the PDIA are part of a recent surge of interest in archives and visual history on the internet. This is partly due to museums, galleries and libraries digitising vast portions of their collections.  This shift has transformed how we access and engage with visual history – academically, but also on a personal level.

For artists and designers, The Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA) could be the starting point for visual references; for a writer, the beginning of a new story or for many just for the pure joy of discovery – but in a time when AI is dominating conversations around visually creative tools, one this for sure is that its is a counterweight to the direction technology is heading as an healthy, green athuthetic alternative.

Explore the database, with new images added every week.