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. 13 shown for “Tintype of Emmaline” — 64 records examined, 39 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-03 04:45 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.

[Two Tinsmiths Cutting a Curled Sheet of Metal]

Unknown · 1880s

Public domainThe Met

Tintype of Emmaline

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1882

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

[Painter, Standing in Front of a Painted Window Backdrop, with Brushes, Bucket, and Paint Cans]

Unknown · 1870s–80s

Public domainThe Met

[Man on a Ladder]

Unknown · 1860s–80s

Public domainThe Met

[Stonecutter with Child]

Unknown · 1860s–70s

Public domainThe Met

[Two Firemen (?) with Axes]

Unknown · late 1850s–60s

Public domainThe Met

[Painter Resting His Hand on Picket Fence]

Unknown · 1860s–80s

Public domainThe Met

[Two Stovepipe Makers, One with a Hammer and Tin Snips, the Other Sitting on Stovepipe Assembly with Tin Snips and Mallet]

Unknown · 1880s

Public domainThe Met

[Tinsmith in Front of Painted Outdoor Backdrop]

Unknown · 1860s–70s

Public domainThe Met

[Group of Men and Boys Standing Along the Railing of the Fulton Street Bridge]

Unknown · 1866–68

Public domainThe Met

[Carpenter Holding a Bag of Tools and a Square]

Unknown · 1880–90s

Public domainThe Met

[Crew of Twenty-one Workmen Posing With Tools Outdoors]

Unknown · 1860s–80s

Public domainThe Met

[Two Young Men Outdoors, One Seated, the Other on the Arm of the Chair]

Unknown · 1880s

Public domainThe Met

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. 127 matched · 24 examined · 0 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. 2859177 matched · 40 examined · 39 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.1 shown

These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-03 04:45 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.