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. 24 shown for “Photograph of girl mailing a letter” — 64 records examined, 7 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 01:18 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Marble grave stele of a little girl
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 450–440 BCE

Photograph of girl mailing a letter
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1920

The Letter
Camille Corot · ca. 1865

Tintype of a unidentified young girl in a mailing card
Artist not stated in the record · early 20th century

Portrait of a Man, Possibly a Self-Portrait
Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez) · ca. 1635

Photograph of letter carriers with handcarts
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1900

Two Children Teasing a Cat
Annibale Carracci

Photograph of letter carrier collecting mail
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1915

Young Woman Peeling Apples
Nicolaes Maes · ca. 1655

Photograph of letter carrier collecting mail
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1947

Armor of Mail and Plate
Artist not stated in the record · late 18th–first half of the 19th century

Photograph of letter carrier delivering mail
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1905

Young Lady in 1866
Edouard Manet · 1866

Photograph of parcel post truck and carrier
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1950

The Letter
Pietro Longhi (Pietro Falca) · 1746

Photograph of letter carrier collecting mail
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1906

A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?)
Edgar Degas · 1865

Photograph of letter carrier retrieving mail from mailbox
Artist not stated in the record · 1992

Joan of Arc
Jules Bastien-Lepage · 1879

Photograph of mail collection wagons
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1905

Marble grave stele of a young woman and servant
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 400–390 BCE

Photograph of letter carrier collecting mail
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1890

Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement
Fra Filippo Lippi · ca. 1440

Photograph of letter carrier delivering mail
Artist not stated in the record · 1908
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. 1289 matched · 24 examined · 4 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 3885856 matched · 40 examined · 3 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 01:18 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.