Image licensing policy
Every photograph on this site can answer four questions in public: who made it, where it came from, under what licence, and whether that licence permits this use. Any image that cannot is not published.
The rule
An image is publishable here only when its creator, source URL, licence and licence URL are all recorded in the database. This is enforced in code, at the point of rendering as well as at the point of import: a row missing any of those fields is dropped rather than displayed without a credit. The same test applies to an image added by an editor as to one collected automatically.
What we use
- Wikimedia Commons files whose own file page states a licence we can honour: public domain, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA.
- Museum and archive open-access collections, principally works released under CC0 or as public domain.
- Historical material out of copyright.
- Photographs released under a Creative Commons licence permitting commercial use and modification.
What we will not do
- Take an image from Google Images, Instagram, Pinterest, a magazine, a retailer or a brand's website because it is publicly visible. Visible is not licensed.
- Publish a file whose licence states non-commercial or no-derivatives, or which carries a personality-rights or trademark restriction.
- Use a brand's press assets beyond what the rights explicitly permit.
- Pass off a generated image as a photograph of a real thing. No real house, shop, city, person or museum object on this site is depicted by a generated image: those carry licensed photographs or nothing. The editorial still lifes that illustrate concept pages (cloth, garments, accessories, techniques, schools of cut, the Start Here path, guides and history) are the publisher's own artwork, made to one brief with a generative model, credited as such in the picture credits of every page that shows one, and never captioned as a photograph of a named maker's work.
Relevance, as well as licence
A free licence does not make a photograph the right one. Every image in the library has been checked against the entry it is attached to, and in September 2026 a review removed 94 that were properly licensed but showed something else. The test is simple: if a reader would take a picture to show the entry's subject, it has to show it.
One photograph, one page
Every photograph on this site appears on exactly one page, and once on that page. A picture of vicuña illustrates the vicuña entry or the card that leads to it, never both, and never a different subject. This is enforced in code rather than by eye: each photograph is given one place, in order of priority (the homepage's own pictures, then the subject's page, then the homepage grids, then the subject's card in its section, then the comparisons, then the subject's gallery) and nothing else can show it.
Where a subject has no photograph of its own
Tailoring houses carry no photograph on this site, and nor does any subject whose only available picture would be of something else: a street standing in for a house, a city for a craftsman, a bolt of cloth for a named mill. Their cards carry a typographic plate (the name set over a woven ground drawn in the page's own code, not a photograph) and their pages carry drawings and the record itself instead.
Attribution
Credits are listed at the foot of the page where each photograph appears: creator, source with a link to the original file, and the licence with a link to its terms. Where a licence requires a specific form of attribution, that exact wording is stored and used. Where a work is public domain we still name the creator and the holding institution, because attribution is good practice whether or not a licence compels it.
Historical works
Paintings, engravings and early photographs are labelled by medium, so that a nineteenth-century engraving of a tailor's shop is never presented as a photograph of one. Dates are given where the source records them.
What is in the library
507 images, by licence:
| Licence | Images | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|
| Il Sartoriale original art | 189 | Permitted |
| Public domain | 93 | Permitted |
| CC BY-SA 4.0 | 77 | Permitted |
| CC0 | 56 | Permitted |
| CC BY-SA 3.0 | 33 | Permitted |
| CC BY-SA 2.0 | 17 | Permitted |
| CC BY 2.0 | 12 | Permitted |
| CC BY 4.0 | 10 | Permitted |
| CC BY 3.0 | 7 | Permitted |
| CC0 1.0 (Public Domain Dedication) | 6 | Permitted |
| CC BY 3.0 us | 2 | Permitted |
| CC BY-SA 3.0 at | 2 | Permitted |
| CC BY 2.5 | 1 | Permitted |
| CC BY-SA 2.5 | 1 | Permitted |
| CC BY-SA 3.0 de | 1 | Permitted |
| Source | Images |
|---|---|
| Wikimedia Commons | 312 |
| Il Sartoriale | 189 |
| The Metropolitan Museum of Art | 6 |
If an image is yours
If you are the creator of an image here and the credit is wrong, the licence has been misread, or you would like it removed, write to us through the corrections form and it will be corrected or taken down promptly. We would rather lose a photograph than keep one we should not have.