organizationsWikimedia Commons

also: Commons

Media repository run by the Wikimedia Foundation, launched on 7 September 2004, holding over 147 million free-to-use files as of September 2026. Every picture in this atlas comes from here or from a source under the same terms. That is a constraint on what this atlas can show, and it shapes which museums are visible in it.

cited

When

launched 7 September 2004 still carried cited

Period	2004 to now
How the date is known	textual — a dated text describes it

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

Commons takes only files that are out of copyright or published under a free licence, and its definition of free is strict: a licence must specifically and irrevocably allow anyone to use the material for any purpose. Republication and distribution must be allowed. Commercial use must be allowed. The licence must be perpetual and non-revocable. A file must also be free of copyright restrictions in both the United States and the source country of the work.

What that admits: CC0, public domain, Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the Free Art License, and free software licences. What it refuses: CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND, and fair use — in Commons' own words, it "does not accept fair use justifications", and material licensed exclusively under non-commercial-only licences is not accepted either.

Inference — run that rule across the museums in this atlas and the map goes uneven. The Metropolitan Museum of Art put its public-domain images under CC0 in 2017, so a Met amulet can be shown here. The British Museum released 1.9 million images in 2020 under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which bars commercial use, so a British Museum amulet cannot. The Pitt Rivers Museum names no Creative Commons licence at all. Wellcome Collection licenses per item, so each picture has to be checked on its own page.

The consequence is worth stating plainly rather than hiding in a caption: a reader looking at this atlas is looking at the collections that chose an open licence, not at the collections that hold the most material.

cited

Now

This atlas accepts CC0, public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA and the Free Art License, and nothing else. Every image record carries its file name, its licence, its licence URL and its author, and a picture whose licence cannot be read is not published. Candidate files are listed on each record before they are fetched, so the licence is checked at the point of collection rather than at the point of publication.

inference

What is on record about it

Publishes open images — free licences only: CC0, public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA, the Free Art License and free software licences; no fair use and no non-commercial-only material cited

What this is near

storyFree to usethe long read this record is the machinery behind — what this atlas may show, and why the gaps are where they are orgThe Metropolitan Museum of Artthe collection whose CC0 release clears this bar, which is why Met photographs run through these records contrastThe British Museumthe collection whose non-commercial licence does not clear it, however large the collection is orgWellcome Collectionthe mixed case: some of its items clear the bar and some do not, so each file is checked singly orgMuseum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewaa collection with openly available images and, separately, a request about taonga this atlas honours regardless of licence contrastAustralian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studiesthe opposite premise: a collection where access conditions travel with the item and open reuse is not the default storyWho owns a charmthe long read on ownership; a free licence on a photograph settles nothing about the object in it

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

contrastRoom 1: Enlightenment, the British Museumthe repository that cannot take this room's photographs, because the museum's licence bars commercial use contrastAustralian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studiesthe opposite arrangement: a repository whose whole premise is that anyone may reuse anything in it contrastThe British Museumthe repository this museum's images cannot go to, because the licence forbids commercial use orgThe Metropolitan Museum of Artwhere its CC0 images can legally live, which is why Met pictures turn up across this atlas orgWellcome Collectionwhere its attribution and public-domain items can be hosted; its non-commercial ones cannot orgFree to usewhere every picture in this atlas is to come from, and whose free-content test the pipeline copies

Where this came from

Wikimedia Commons — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Commons:Licensing — Wikimedia Commons read 2026-09-16
Metropolitan Museum of Art — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
British Museum makes 1.9 million images available for free — ianVisits read 2026-09-16
Collections Online — Terms and Conditions — Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford read 2026-09-16
Accessing our collections — Wellcome Collection read 2026-09-16

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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