Search Images
search_imagesSearch 200,000+ historical illustrations, emblems, engravings, diagrams, AND 24,000+ artworks (paintings, prints, sculptures). Filter by type, subject, figure, symbol, year. Results interleave two collections: illustrations extracted from book pages (each with a page number and book link) and standalone museum artworks (type: "artwork"). The first few results also return as inline images YOU can see. Hosts that support MCP Apps render an in-chat image gallery for this tool automatically; on other clients images may sit inside the collapsed tool-result view, so never tell the user images are "rendered above" unless the gallery appeared — describe what you see and give each image's url link instead. Every image_url is public and stable — an HTML page that references them directly works in any online browser. If images.length is 0, read the note field — an empty result under a book_id filter means that book has no EXTRACTED images yet, not that the physical book has no plates. A broad query can match tens of thousands (read total): narrow with type/subject/symbol/iconclass or page with offset instead of raising limit. On museum-artwork results, a title_is_descriptive flag means the title is an AI description of the picture rather than a title the work was published under — cite such a record by its source_record_title, never by the descriptive one (#4288).
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| type | No | Image type (woodcut, engraving, emblem, diagram). Best-effort: the medium metadata on museum artworks is unnormalized, so treat results as ranked rather than strictly filtered. | |
| limit | No | Max results (default 20, max 50) | |
| query | No | Text search (e.g., "ouroboros", "tree of life") | |
| figure | No | ||
| offset | No | Skip this many book-illustration results — page through a large result set instead of raising limit. The response echoes offset and returns next_offset while more remain. Offsets > 0 return the gallery lane only (the museum-artwork lane has no pagination and is included only on the first page). | |
| symbol | No | ||
| book_id | No | Only return images extracted from this book's pages. Excludes the museum-artwork collection (artworks do not belong to books). | |
| subject | No | ||
| year_to | No | See year_from — same reliability caution applies. | |
| iconclass | No | Filter by Iconclass notation, prefix-matched ("49" matches 49G22, 49E39, …). Coverage is SPARSE: only ~2,500 of 206K images carry a notation, so an empty result means the classifier has not run on matching images, NOT that the subject is absent from the corpus — retry with a text query before concluding anything. Book-illustration lane only (artworks are excluded when this filter is set). Matching results return their notations in an iconclass array. | |
| year_from | No | CAUTION: reliable only for book illustrations (source_type "book_illustration"). On museum-artwork records the year field is dirty — some 17th-century works carry ingest years like 2014, and null years bypass the range check entirely — so never draw a chronological conclusion from a year-filtered artwork result (#4288 tracks the cleanup). | |
| include_thumbnail_base64 | No | Embed each result's image as a thumbnail_data_uri (data:image/jpeg;base64,…, ~1000px) directly in the JSON. ONLY useful when your harness consumes tool results programmatically (API/SDK agents that can save the bytes without retyping them) — as a chat assistant you CANNOT copy hundreds of KB of base64 into a file, so do not request this for that purpose. To build a self-contained page from chat instead: fetch the public image_url values with your execution sandbox (if egress is blocked, ask the user to allowlist images.sourcelibrary.org in their network settings), or reference the CDN URLs directly — they are public and stable, so the page works in any online browser. First 6 results only; inline image blocks are suppressed in this mode to keep the payload bounded. |