Free arty high-res images

March 7, 2012 8:48 AM

Good free sources of interesting/arty high-res images?

Just moved house and keen to have some interesting images to decorate the walls.

Looking for a good free (or low-cost) source of high-res images.

I know Flickr has some great stuff but you have to wade through countless pages to find it.

I like the images flagged up on sites such as http://ffffound.com/ but they're not high-res enough to be used big.

Any leads gratefully accepted!

posted by Blackwatch to Home & Garden (6 answers total)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/
posted by ecorrocio at 8:49 AM on March 7, 2012

http://www.reddit.com/r/earthporn (and other subreddits in their "SFW Porn Network")
posted by Perplexity at 9:00 AM on March 7, 2012

Interfacelift is a background site, but has excellent content and lets you filter by resolution.
posted by Wulfhere at 11:17 AM on March 7, 2012

THis site has lots of strange ephemera and cool vintage illustrations at 300 res: 50 Watts.
posted by to recite so charmingly at 8:14 PM on March 7, 2012

Recently did a bit of this. Try: Shorpy (old B&W photos exclusively) and the Library of Congress (old photos, artwork, posters, newer stuff, frequently at VERY high resolutions). I printed out a bunch of posters going up to 24x36.

Some examples I used:
Brooklyn
NYC (the one on the right -- the one on the left is a poster from art.com)
The "See America" series @ L.O.C.: #1 #2 #3.

These are all available as TIFFs going up to 50-150 MB. A little cropping and color-fixing and they were good to go to the printers. There are other non-American ones too.
posted by zvs at 8:50 PM on March 7, 2012

Response by poster: Some wonderful suggestions, folks. Thanks very much for taking the time to help me out.

Cheers!
posted by Blackwatch at 1:19 AM on March 8, 2012