More downloadable images of Yale’s campus, people, and events can be found on the university’s official Instagram account. The rights and restrictions governing usage of these images are outlined in Yale’s Terms of Use.
In addition, several Yale University departments and programs have digital image collections that are available for use by the public and/or the campus community — some for free, some for a fee. The following are just some of those collections. Be sure to consult the terms of use for each collection.
Discover Yale Digital Content
This website includes images from Yale’s collections of art, natural history, books, and maps, as well as photos, audio, and video documenting the people, places, and events that form part of Yale’s institutional identity and contribution to scholarship. Not all content available through Discover Yale Digital Content is unrestricted. Please refer to the individual repository website and to the rights information in the record for each item.
Yale University Library Digital Collections
The cross-collection search includes over 600,000 images in selected Library Digital Collections. Some of the collections are only available on campus or via VPN. The site also includes a suite of teaching and learning tools, such as making a gallery/group of images and annotating it, available for patrons with a Yale NetID.
Two major collections within the library are:
- Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Digital Library
Search 250,000 digitized images of photographs, textual documents, illuminated manuscripts, maps, works of art, and books from the Beinecke’s collections. - Manuscripts and Archives
This database contains digital reproductions of photographs, posters, drawings, text documents, and other images, ranging from collections of personal and family papers to organizational records that document a variety of areas, as well as the university’s own archives.
Yale University Art Gallery
This image database includes more than 80,000 objects from the gallery’s comprehensive collections of world art from antiquity to the present.
Yale Center for British Art
The center’s online catalog, currently represents over one 100,000 records from the center’s collections.
Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
The Yale Peabody Museum is home to one of the oldest and largest University natural history collections in the world. Our search portal allows you to explore millions of specimens across ten collecting divisions, putting the history of life on this planet at your fingertips. We encourage the use of our collections for research, publication, exhibition, and education.
Yale Collection of Musical Instruments
Download images of the collection’s holdings of musical instruments, which range in age from antiquity to the present, and come from countries throughout the world.