Wilhelm Weimar – Maiglöckchen

From Petapixel: Europeana Online Gallery Offers you 2.2 million photos from the first century of photography.

If you’re looking for inspiration, knowledge, or want to trace the history of photography, here’s something for you. Europeana Collections’ impressive digital gallery features 2.2 million images, covering the first 100 years of photography. Among the featured names, there are Man Ray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eadweard Muybridge and Nicola Perscheid, to name a few. The photographs come from 34 countries, and many of them are free for the visitors to download and use.

Photoconsortium, the International Consortium for Photographic Heritage, started this project in collaboration with Europeana. The goal was to promote photography and photographic heritage. As Mr. Douglas McCarthy states in the Europeana blog, over 50 European institutions in 34 countries contributed with the scanned historical photos. As a result, there’s a truly impressive number of images for all of us to browse and use.

When you open the website, you will be able to search it based on different criteria. You can pick the collection and the type of media you want to browse through. Also, you can add the parameters like country, language and institution. What’s very important and useful is that there’s also a criterion about usage. If you need photos for other purposes than personal, you can apply the “Free Re-use” search filter. Lastly, you can explore the website in 23 different languages.