The National Gallery in London has announced that it is making images of their collection free to download for personal use. It is great to see that this includes non-profit publication and includes (non-profit) publication online. However, it is a disappointing that the image sizes are restricted to 800 pixels on the longest size. This renders them useless for close study (the image reproduced below at its maximum size, any larger and it starts to pixelate). It is smaller than is generally recommended for online reproduction and far too small for many print publications. Presumably if you want a larger image to publish or to study in detail you still have to pay, which rather diminishes the gesture of making them freely available online. I assume that this restriction is stop ‘illegal’ use of larger images in ‘for-profit’ publications, but it seems unnecessarily restrictive and even regressive when most open-access digital downloads from museums are available as large files (a randomly selected example from the Getty is available at a whopping 55MB). So it is a welcome start, but lagging behind many other major museums and galleries.

From the website

The National Gallery recently made 2,385 digital images of the collection available to download free for non-commercial use.

Download links to these images are now available from individual painting pages on the Gallery’s website.

This represents a significant step forward in providing our audience with greater digital access to the collection, and will make it easier for you to access quality photographic reproductions of our paintings for non-commercial use.

Some examples of non-commercial use, include:

• Research, private study, or for internal circulation within an educational organisation (such as a school, college, or university)

• Non-profit publications, personal websites, blogs, and social media