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A collage of artworks including a painting of a person's face, a painting of a cat lounging on a pillow, a quilt, a photograph of a person with their hair tied up and back facing the camera, and a fragment of a statue representing the lower portion of a woman's face.

Open Access at The Met

Data about The Met collection, including over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks, is available for free and unrestricted use.

In February 2017, The Met introduced its Open Access Initiative, which makes images of public-domain artworks and basic data on all accessioned works in its collection available for unrestricted use under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). Anyone can download, share, and remix images and data about artworks in The Met collection. It is also an important statement about The Met's commitment to increasing access to the collection in a digital age. Read The Met’s Image and Data Resources for more information about the Museum’s open access policy and resources.

Peer organizations
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
The Art Institute of Chicago
The Cleveland Museum of Art
The National Gallery of Art
The Smithsonian Institution

Contact us
For more information, or to share your project with us, email openaccess@metmuseum.org

FEATURED

Experience The Met collection in 3D

Explore more than 100 new 3D models of objects from The Met collection. Rotate, zoom in, and get closer than ever before.

Browse the images

Get Started

Discover three ways to get Open Access images and data.

An artwork of a woman in a blue gown
Art Search
Browse Images in The Online Collection
Explore more than 492,000 Open Access works in The Online Collection. All Open Access images also have an “OA” icon, at the lower left of the image.
A man dressed in colonial attire rests his hand on a writing desk adjacent to an open door that looks into a room of shelves storing an abundance of folded textiles
GitHub
Use The Met’s API
The Met’s Open Access datasets are available through our API. The API (RESTful web service in JSON format) gives access to all of The Met’s Open Access data and to corresponding high resolution images (JPEG format) that are in the public domain.
A long rectangular tablet painted mostly with black and some red calligraphic characters in consecutive vertical columns spanning the full width of the tablet
Github
Download The Open Access CSV
The datasets are available in CSV format, encoded in UTF-8. Users of Excel on a Mac can convert the UTF-8 to UTF-16 so the file can be imported correctly.

Projects

Find inspiration from Open Access projects.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's fifth avenue entrance on a clear day featuring tall columns and a prominent red banner displaying "THE MET."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art to Publish Over 100 Three-Dimensional Models of Iconic Works from Across Its Collection
A series of nine models were co-produced with NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) using specialized imaging techniques to realize the capture of monumental works. Rotate, zoom in, and get closer than ever before.
3D rendering of the Temple of Dendur at The Met, with scaffolding and materials showing the temple under construction.
Explore The Met in VR
Explore The Met’s art in two immersive VR experiences featuring the Temple of Dendur and Oceania highlights, available on web or the Atopia VR App.

More resources