Determining Where to Look

After defining your image needs, you should think about where you might find the types of images you are looking for. There are three broad categories of places to look:

1. Where original images are hosted. This includes sites where image creators, such as artists and photographers, publish their work, as well as platforms where social media users post personal images, or where images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are showcased.
2. Where reproduced images are published. This includes print and online publications like journals, magazines, blogs, and books. 
3. Where images of all kinds are collected. This includes: physical and digital libraries; archives and museum collections; databases and other online image repositories; search engines; and online pin/mood boards.

As previously noted, thinking about what kinds of images you are looking for and where you are likely to find them will help you create a search strategy. 

If you need an historic photograph for a presentation on American civil rights activism, it may make more sense to look in a publication or image collection related to that topic rather than on an image on a site where creators publish their original works. Your strategy might be to look at UNCG Libraries’ History or Primary Sources guides for ideas of specific archival collections, to search through the UNCG Special Collections and University Archives’ digital local history collections, to find a book about the civil rights movement in the UNCG Library Catalog, or to check out the Digital Public Library of America or Smithsonian collections through the Finding and Using Images guide.

This photograph of protesters in downtown Atlanta was taken on March 17, 1965 by Billy Downs. It is a copyrighted photograph held in the digital archival collections of Georgia State University that is used with permission for educational purposes (see https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/ajc/id/11324).

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