OpenTwo 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. 12 shown for “Photograph of airmail pilot James Hill ready for transcontinental night flight” — 40 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 11:16 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Photograph of airmail pilot James Hill ready for transcontinental night flight
Artist not stated in the record · July 1, 1925
Photograph of airmail pilot Paul Collins and bag of first overnight airmail
Artist not stated in the record · July 1, 1925
Photograph of airmail planes at Omaha, Nebraska
Artist not stated in the record · 1920
Photograph of airmail being loaded in New Brunswick, New Jersey
Artist not stated in the record · July 1, 1925
Photograph of airmail pilot Arthur Roy Smith
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1924
Photograph of airmail loaded for pathfinding transcontinental flight
Artist not stated in the record · July 29, 1920
Photograph of airmail pilot James DeWitt Hill
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1924
Photograph of airmail pilot Jack Knight
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1924
Photograph of airmail being unloaded in Omaha, Nebraska
Artist not stated in the record · July 2, 1924
Photograph of airmail pilot Lt. Torrey Webb and NYC Postmaster Thomas G. Patten
Artist not stated in the record · May 15, 1918
Photograph of airmail pilot Shirley J. Short
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1921
Photograph of airmail pilot Lloyd Bertaud and unidentified individual
Artist not stated in the record · September 6, 1927
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. The archive returned no records for this term.0 matched - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 3030207 matched · 40 examined · 0 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 2026-09-01 11:16 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.