Layers of Meaning

Public Domain Image Resources

Public Domain and US Government image archives -
Edited from Wikipedia - 10-7-2003.

Animals and Plants, Food and Insects - all things agricultural
Agricultural Research Service Image Gallery http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/graphics/photos/index.html

USDA Photography Center - images of all sorts of agriculturally items from school lunch program to fire fighters to farm animals http://www.usda.gov/oc/photo/opclibra.htm

Photographs from the Farm Security Administration's renowned collection of the 1930s and 1940s http://www.usda.gov/oc/photo/histfeat.htm

Birds
A large archive of Audubon-esque bird prints - all text in German http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/birds/regengl.htm

Fish
NOAA Photo Library - large archive of underwater images http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/nurp/index.html

Yellowstone
Public Domain Images of Yellowstonehttp://www.nps.gov/yell/press/images/

Maps
Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress - digital map archive 1500-2002 (some maps under copyright)http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/gmdhome.html

National Highway System's road maps of each state http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/hep10/nhs/

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection historic and contemporary maps http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/index.html see their usage page

People
Note regarding Library of Congress images: Anything prior to 1924 is in the public domain; post-1924 images that are copyright-free will be indicated on the site.

Library of Congress 725 photographs dating from 1839 to 1864(mostly portraits) http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/daghome.html

1,395 photographs by Carl Van Vechten between 1932 and 1964. portrait photographs of celebrities and an assortment of American landscapes; Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vvhtml/vvhome.html

Portraits of famous people; Library of Congress http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/235_alph.html

Portraits of historical figures from the Perry-Castañeda Library, University of Texas at Austin http://www.lib.utexas.edu/photodraw/portraits/index.html

Space and spaceflight
Great Images in NASA library of images. GRIN is a collection of over a thousand images of significant historical interest scanned at high-resolution in several sizes.
http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/
NASA image gallery http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html

Public domain photography taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. (copyright notice) http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/

NASA Space Shuttle Earth Observations Photography database of over 400,000 images is a national treasure. (Looking down at teh earth from space) http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/

General Collections
Collection of public domain photos organized by category. Great images- not all are public domain http://geekphilosopher.com/MainPage/photos.htm