Sources
InspoSearch queries ~2,400 sources across eight categories. The count is split between:
- ~180 static adapters hand-written in
src/fetchers.jsand community manifests ininsposearch/sources/*.json - ~2,300 dynamic providers discovered at runtime from Europeana's
DATA_PROVIDERfacets (~2,250) and DPLA hubs (~50)
Dynamic discovery requires the Europeana / DPLA keys — see API Keys. Without them, you still get the static set and anonymous APIs.
The eight categories
| Category | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Museums | Major and regional museums — painting, sculpture, decorative arts, ethnographic collections |
| Historical | National libraries, archives, digital heritage aggregators (Europeana, DPLA, Trove, Gallica, LoC) |
| Art and Design | Illustration archives, design collections, typography, poster archives |
| Photography | Press archives, photo agencies, stock providers, historic photography |
| Nature | Natural history museums, botanical illustration, biodiversity atlases |
| Maps | Cartographic collections, historical atlases, map libraries |
| Fashion | Costume archives, textile design, fashion photography |
| Science | Scientific illustration, medical archives, astronomy, technical drawings |
Toggle entire categories or individual sources from the source filter sidebar (s).
Highlighted static sources
This is a representative selection, not the full list. The definitive list is in the source filter sidebar in the app.
Museums
| Source | API style | Key? |
|---|---|---|
| The Metropolitan Museum of Art | REST | — |
| Rijksmuseum | REST | ✓ |
| Victoria and Albert Museum | REST | — |
| Art Institute of Chicago | REST | — |
| Cleveland Museum of Art | REST | — |
| Walters Art Museum | REST | — |
| Harvard Art Museums | REST | ✓ |
| Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian | REST | ✓ |
| National Gallery of Art (US) | REST | — |
| Los Angeles County Museum of Art | REST | — |
| Brooklyn Museum | REST | — |
| Yale University Art Gallery | REST | — |
| Philadelphia Museum of Art | REST | — |
| Musée du Louvre | REST | — |
| Museo del Prado | REST | — |
| Uffizi | REST | — |
| National Gallery (London) | REST | — |
| State Hermitage Museum | REST | — |
| Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna | REST | — |
| Museum Digital (DE / NAT / SMB) | REST | — |
Historical / Archives
| Source | API style | Key? |
|---|---|---|
| Europeana | REST | ✓ (unlocks ~2,000 sub-providers) |
| Digital Public Library of America | REST | ✓ (unlocks DPLA hubs) |
| Library of Congress | REST | — |
| Smithsonian Open Access | REST | — |
| Internet Archive | REST | — |
| National Archives (NARA) | REST | — |
| Biodiversity Heritage Library | REST | — |
| David Rumsey Map Collection | REST | — |
| Wellcome Collection | REST / IIIF | — |
| British Library | IIIF | — |
| Gallica (BnF) | REST | — |
| National Library of Australia (Trove) | REST | ✓ |
| National Diet Library (Japan) | REST | — |
| Bodleian Libraries (Oxford) | IIIF | — |
| Cambridge Digital Library | IIIF | — |
| Digital Commonwealth | IIIF | — |
| Bayerische Staatsbibliothek | IIIF | — |
Photography
| Source | API style | Key? |
|---|---|---|
| Unsplash | REST | ✓ |
| Flickr Commons | REST | ✓ |
| Pexels | REST | ✓ |
| Pixabay | REST | ✓ |
| rawpixel | REST | — |
| Library of Congress Prints & Photographs | REST | — |
| George Eastman Museum | REST | — |
| Sketchfab Heritage | REST | — |
Art and Design
| Source | API style | Key? |
|---|---|---|
| Wikimedia Commons | REST | — |
| Artvee | Scrape | — |
| Cooper Hewitt (Design) | REST | ✓ |
| Noun Project | REST | ✓ |
| Open Clip Art | REST | — |
| Creative Commons Search | REST | — |
| Behance | REST | — |
| Giphy | REST | ✓ |
Nature
| Source | API style | Key? |
|---|---|---|
| Biodiversity Heritage Library | REST | — |
| Natural History Museum (London) | REST | — |
| Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History | REST | — |
| New York Botanical Garden | REST | — |
| iNaturalist | REST | — |
API styles, explained
| Style | What it means | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| REST | Standard HTTP + JSON | Met, Unsplash, Europeana |
| IIIF | International Image Interoperability Framework — standardised image / manifest APIs | British Library, Bodleian, Wellcome |
| Scrape | HTML scraping (no official API) | Artvee |
IIIF sources automatically get deep-zoom support via OpenSeadragon. REST sources get deep-zoom only if they serve IIIF image tiles on the side.
CORS-blocked sources
A handful of APIs don't allow browser-to-server calls and can't be queried client-side. These are fetched nightly by a GitHub Actions job and served from pre-computed JSON in insposearch/data/. The source sidebar treats them identically to live ones.
Missing a source? Add it
If there's a public image API you want to see in InspoSearch, adding it is usually a single JSON manifest plus an optional adapter function.
See Adding a Source for the schema, the 3-term test protocol, and the PR checklist.