Images / art

Two archives, queried live.

Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 18 shown for “Albumen print of Solomon Frister” — 48 records examined, 15 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-10 10:58 UTC · fetched live for this request

Public domainThe Met’s isPublicDomain field is true for this object.

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian’s metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.

Not shownAnything failing its archive’s rights field is dropped server-side and never appears here.

Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary)

Paul Gauguin · 1891

Public domainThe Met

Albumen print of Solomon Frister

Artist not stated in the record · 1864-1865

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

[Winter Scene with Trestle Bridge Along the Atlantic & Great Western Railway]

James Fitzallen Ryder · 1862–64

Public domainThe Met

Two war photographers (or correspondents)

Philp & Solomons, active 1860s · c. 1860

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

[Solomon Alexander Hart]

John and Charles Watkins · 1860s

Public domainThe Met

Franklin Philp

Philp & Solomons, active 1860s · c. 1865

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Chief Officer and Clerks of the Ambulance Department, 9th Army Corps, in Front of Petersburg, Virginia

Timothy H. O'Sullivan · August 1864

Public domainThe Met

Carte-de-visite portrait of Margaret Alsop

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1865

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

[Botanical Specimen: Fern]

Unknown · 1855–60

Public domainThe Met

Timothy O'Sullivan

Philp & Solomons, active 1860s · c. 1870

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg

Timothy H. O'Sullivan · 1863

Public domainThe Met

Albumen print of a man with moustache

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1900

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Albumen print of Harriet Tubman

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1908; printed ca. 1920

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Albumen print of three members of the Boyd family

Unidentified · 1890-1930

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Cathedral, Panama

Eadweard Muybridge, born Kingston-upon-Thames, England 1830-died Kingston-upon-Thames, England 1904 · 1875, published 1877

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Solola, Guatemala

Eadweard Muybridge, born Kingston-upon-Thames, England 1830-died Kingston-upon-Thames, England 1904 · 1875, published 1877

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Lake Amatitlán, Guatemala

Eadweard Muybridge, born Kingston-upon-Thames, England 1830-died Kingston-upon-Thames, England 1904 · 1875, published 1877

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Amapala, Honduras

Eadweard Muybridge, born Kingston-upon-Thames, England 1830-died Kingston-upon-Thames, England 1904 · 1875, published 1877

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

What was queried

Where these records came from.

Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.

The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field: isPublicDomain. 8 matched · 8 examined · 2 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.6 shown
Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field: content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 2875067 matched · 40 examined · 13 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.12 shown

These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-10 10:58 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.

Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.

An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.

Read the method

Elsewhere in the catalogue

Section 01Character index9 hand-compiled entries, each with sources, version scope, and a confidence value.Section 02NewsWhat has already cleared the US term, and what clears next — January 1, 2027.Section 03MethodThree status values, three confidence values, and copyright kept apart from trademark.