image-archive

Openverse

A search engine from the WordPress project spanning more than 800 million openly licensed and public-domain images and audio files drawn from many source collections. Search on the website or via its keyless API. Best when you want reusable media and one query across many open collections instead of visiting each separately.

Images API

Search this archive

Why it’s useful & how it works

Openverse is the quickest way to cast a single search across many open-content collections at once, rather than visiting each one separately. It draws from sources including Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, the Smithsonian, Europeana, and hundreds of other providers. Searching on the website or via its API returns images or audio with licence type, attribution text, and a link back to the original source, so you can verify and cite with confidence.

What’s inside

More than 800 million openly licensed and public-domain images and audio tracks indexed from numerous collections across the web.

API access

https://api.openverse.org/v1/images/?q= ; /v1/audio/?q=

What we measured

Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.

Reachability

Direct request: Cloudflare challenge HTTP 403 300 ms (just a moment)
Through a datacenter proxy: Cloudflare challenge HTTP 403 499 ms (just a moment)
API, direct: Responded HTTP 200 1 s
API, through a proxy: Responded HTTP 200 1.1 s

Did a real search return anything?

Returned results · 240 results for the sample query · median 627 ms · stable across runs

Sample query: Cat bliss

Benchmark coverage

Found 8 of 8 test items (100%) in the Images cluster. Median response 667 ms.

By how well known the item is: 3/3 well-known, 4/4 mid, 1/1 obscure .

One item it found: Cat bliss

Reachability measured 2026-08-22. Search checked 2026-08-22. Benchmark run 2026-08-22.