Do you love space? Of course you do. Who doesn’t? If you have a tendency to trawl through websites looking for the best photos of cosmic wonders to use as desktop pictures, NASA is here to help. The space agency has just put together a searchable reservoir of 140,000 images, videos and audio clips.
The best news is that this media is free to download, so you can access the images (in multiple resolutions) and use them for whatever purpose you’d like – whether that’s embedding them on your own website or printing them onto your bed cushions.
The site is easy on the eyes, with files arranged across a mosaic of columns. Users can narrow their search by year, or simply pull up the newest or most popular images and videos.
“NASA Image and Video Library allows users to search, discover and download a treasure trove of more than 140,000 NASA images, videos and audio files from across the agency’s many missions in aeronautics, astrophysics, Earth science, human spaceflight, and more,” NASA said in a press release. “Users now can embed content in their own sites and choose from multiple resolutions to download.”
The site shows image metadata, which includes EXIF details about what equipment was used to capture the pictures, while videos come with captions. Handily, all the content automatically scales for phones and tablets, making it easier to browse pictures of Uranus wherever you are.
It’s always a great thing when big institutions make it easier to access their images copyright-free. If you’re looking for an Earth-bound treasure trove of pictures, the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently made 375,000 of its images available online without restriction.
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