Where to find free old photos of your city, and how to use them legally
Millions of old photographs of streets, squares and harbours are online and free to reuse, if you know where to look and how to read the small print. This guide lists the archives worth searching and explains the licences in plain words.
First, the licences in plain words
"Free to see" and "free to reuse" are not the same thing. Before you put an old photo on a website, in a book or in a video, check its licence. The ones you will meet most often:
| Label | What you may do | What you must do |
|---|---|---|
| Public domain | Anything, including commercial use. | Nothing legally, though naming the source is good practice. |
| CC0 | Anything; the owner has given up their rights. | Nothing legally. |
| CC BY | Anything, including commercial use and changes. | Credit the author and name the licence. |
| CC BY-SA | Anything, including commercial use and changes. | Credit, name the licence, and share your changed version under the same licence. |
| CC BY-NC | Non-commercial use only. | Credit. Do not use it on anything that earns money, including sites with adverts. |
| "No known copyright restrictions" | Usually any use; the archive found no rights holder. | Credit the archive. It is a statement of research, not a guarantee. |
When does an old photo become public domain?
It depends on the country, and the rules are not simple, but two patterns cover most cases:
- In the United States, works published before 1931 are in the public domain as of 2026. Each January another year joins them.
- In most of Europe and many other countries, copyright lasts 70 years after the photographer's death. For photos by unknown photographers, it usually runs 70 years from publication.
So a street photo from the 1890s is almost always free, one from the 1950s often is not, and for anything in between the archive's own rights statement is your best guide. Archives have done this research; trust their label rather than guessing from the date.
The archives worth searching
Wikimedia Commons
The largest single collection of freely licensed images, with tens of millions of files and a licence shown on every one. Search for a city name plus "old photographs", or browse categories such as "Istanbul in the 1900s" or "Paris in the 1890s". Many museum and library collections have been copied here in bulk, so Commons is also the easiest way into the archives below. Every file page shows exactly how to credit it.
Library of Congress (United States)
The Prints & Photographs collection holds huge numbers of photos from around the world, not only from America: early colour photochrom prints of European cities, the Abdul Hamid II albums of Ottoman Istanbul, and the Matson collection of the Middle East among them. Many items are marked "No known restrictions on publication".
Rijksmuseum (Netherlands)
The Rijksmuseum releases its public domain works as CC0, in very high resolution, on its own website. Its photography collection includes 19th-century views of cities across Europe and Asia.
Europeana
A search engine across thousands of European libraries, archives and museums. Every result carries a standard rights statement, and you can filter the results to items that may be reused. Quality varies, but for European towns it often finds things nothing else does.
National libraries
Many national libraries have digitised their photo collections: Gallica (France), the British Library, the New York Public Library's digital collections and others. Read each one's terms carefully. Gallica, for example, allows free non-commercial reuse but asks for a licence for commercial use of some material, even when the photo itself is old.
Flickr Commons
Institutions share photos on Flickr marked "no known copyright restrictions". Searching here is quick, and the comments sometimes include locals identifying the exact street.
Searching well
- Use the old names. Constantinople and Stamboul for Istanbul, Bombay for Mumbai, Peking for Beijing, Königsberg for Kaliningrad. Old captions use the names of their time.
- Search in the photographer's language. Many 19th-century views were sold by French and German studios, so "vue de", "Ansicht" and "Straße" find things English words miss.
- Search for landmarks, not just the city. A famous bridge, tower or square gives far more precise results than a city name.
- Look at the categories. On Commons, a good photo's categories often lead to dozens of similar ones by the same photographer or of the same street.
How to credit a photo
A good credit answers four questions: who took it, where it comes from, under which licence, and where to find the original. For example:
Galata Bridge, around 1880. Photo: Abdullah Frères, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
For CC BY and CC BY-SA, put a link to the licence and to the original file. On a website, a short line under the photo is enough; in a book or video, a credits page works.
What to watch out for
- Scans can carry their own claims. Some sites claim copyright on their scans of public domain photos. In the United States and the EU, faithful reproductions of public domain photographs are generally not protected again, but some other countries see it differently. Taking the file from a source that labels it public domain avoids the question.
- Watermarked images are not free. If a photo carries a stock agency's watermark, the agency is selling it, even if the original is old.
- People in photos. Old street scenes are fine to publish, but using a recognisable person's face to advertise something is a different matter in many countries.