Open Access at The Met

Data about The Met collection, including over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks, available for free and unrestricted use.

What is Open Access News and projects Get started

Composite image of several Open Access artworks including a honeycomb patterned quilt, a pointillist painting, an Egyptian head fragment, a cat illustration, and two portraits

What is Open Access?

In February 2017, The Met introduced its Open Access Initiative which makes all images of public-domain artworks and basic data on all accessioned works in its collection available for unrestricted use under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). Now anyone can download, share, and remix images and data about artworks in The Met collection.

The Open Access initiative represents an incredible body of ongoing work by curators, conservators, photographers, librarians, cataloguers, interns, and technologists over the past 151 years of the institution's history—new images and data are added each year. It is also an important statement about The Met's commitment to increasing access to the collection in a digital age.

In the last four years, Open Access images and data have been viewed over 1.2 billion times and downloaded over 7 million times from The Met’s site and on our partner platforms.

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News and projects

Find inspiration from Open Access projects and get the latest news

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NEWS

Scenes from a Salon on Artificial Intelligence

Screenshot from the Animal Crossings video game of a character at the foot of steps leading to a museum facade with a sign in front that reads "The Met"

PROJECTS

Own a Van Gogh … in Animal Crossing, with The Met's New Share Tool

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PROJECTS

The Met’s Art at Your Place? Instagram AR Brings It Home

Get started

Discover three ways to get Open Access images and data

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GITHUB

Use The Met’s API

The Met’s Open Access datasets are available through our API. The API (RESTful web service in JSON format) gives access to all of The Met’s Open Access data and to corresponding high resolution images (JPEG format) that are in the public domain.

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