Archive guide · World
Wikimedia Commons (free-licensed photographs)
searched live by Provara
What it holds
147M free-licensed media files: historical photographs, portraits, maps, scanned documents from GLAM partners
Who runs it, and on what terms
- Provider
- Wikimedia Foundation
- Licence for use here
- Per file: public domain / CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only
- Attribution
- Author and licence as stated on the file page; link to the file
- Cost to search
- free
- Terms read
- 2026-09-06
- Official documentation
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php
How to search it in Provara
- Historical photographs: ask Provara for a photograph of a place or an event your family was part of.
- Historical maps: ask Provara for a map of a place at the time a record names it.
- Letters, diaries and papers: ask Provara whether an archive holds papers from a family or a place.
- Provara searches this archive alongside every other live one, ranks what comes back by how many of the person's recorded facts each hit contains, and shows you the record with a ready citation. Nothing is added to your tree until you confirm it.
Record types here
- Historical photographs — Portraits, places and events held by libraries and archives, free to view and often free to reuse.
- Historical maps — Where a farm, a street or a parish sat when a record was made, and what it was called then.
- Letters, diaries and papers — Personal and institutional papers held by libraries and archives: the texture of a life, and sometimes the only record of it.
No card needed. Build and source your tree free; search these archives free; the assistant's research runs on tokens.
Every licence on these pages was read from the archive's own terms on the date shown. Provara proposes only what a record it has read supports, shows the record beside the claim, and marks anything unsourced as a hypothesis. Nothing on this page states a fact about any person.