American academic Kalev Leetaru has been going through the Internet Archive to build a database of copyright-free photos online.

He has uploaded the collection and tagged them on Flickr. So far the collection boasts more than 2.6 million images.

BBC has the story: “The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organization. The images have been difficult to access until now. Mr Leetaru said digitisation projects had so far focused on words and ignored pictures. ‘For all these years all the libraries have been digitising their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works,’ he told the BBC.”