Licensing

These are scans of real paintings and drawings held by museums, not AI-generated images; cropping and darkening them for a phone screen is ordinary image processing, done by fixed rules, not by a generator.

Nearly everything in this collection comes from an open collection and is not ours to license at all — those are free of us entirely. A few photographs are CC BY and ask for credit. Works drawn by us carry terms of our own, and there are none of those on the shelf today. The tool that enlarges your own picture runs on borrowed work too.

Using a painting from this collection as your wallpaper is free and needs no permission. Most are public domain or CC0, and the few under CC BY ask for credit only if you share the image.

Works from open collections

The collection holds engravings, drawings and paintings that are out of copyright, or whose holder has released the photograph of them under CC0. Those carry no terms from us. You may do anything with them that you could do with the original file, and nothing on this page restricts you.

We claim nothing over them by having framed them. Choosing a crop and resizing it is a mechanical act and creates no new work, so the file you download is the holder's, not ours. Each such work names its author, its source collection and the page it came from, so the claim can be checked rather than taken on trust.

Age alone is not what makes them free. An engraving from 1705 is out of copyright, but a photograph of that engraving can be a new work with a living owner — which is why the collection takes only files whose holder has said otherwise in as many words.

Works under CC BY

A few photographs are free to use on one condition: credit. They are marked CC BY and stay under that licence when you take them — we cannot put our terms on top, and we do not try to. Keep the author's name with the file, link the licence, and say that it was changed.

The Tessarum License

Works drawn by Tessarum come to you under the terms below. Take one, use it, change it, sell what you make with it. Two things only are off limits, and both are about the collection rather than the picture. None of these works are on the shelf at present.

You can

• Download and use the files free of charge, for personal and commercial purposes alike.
• Set them as wallpaper, put them in a design, ship them inside something you sell.
• Crop, recolour and modify them however you like.
• Do all of the above without asking us and without crediting us.

You cannot

• Republish the collection. Gathering Tessarum works into a gallery, an app or a stock library that does what this site does is not permitted, whether free or paid.
• Sell a file unchanged. Selling a work as it stands — as a download, a print, or on an object whose value is the picture itself — is not permitted. Modify it meaningfully and what you made is yours to sell.

The models that enlarge your picture

Enlarging happens on our machines. The picture you drop is sent to us, passed to a graphics card we rent by the second from Modal, and sent straight back to you. We write it to no disk and keep no copy — the enlarged file exists once, in your browser, which is also why there is no second chance at downloading it.

The network there is somebody else's work. 4x-NMKD-Siax by NMKD, under the WTFPL, which asks nothing of anybody.

There is a second one, and you meet it only if the first refuses — our server has a daily ceiling, and past it the page offers to do the work in your own browser instead. Then it downloads a small neural network alongside itself and runs it on your device, and the picture never leaves it. That one is 4x-ClearRealityV1 by Kim2091, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Our copy is modified — the exported output dimensions are corrected, without which it will not run on a graphics card — and so our copy carries the same licence.

None of this touches the file you download. The enlarged picture is yours, on the terms the original work carried; the licences above are ours to keep, not yours.

The ordinary small print

The files are provided as they are, with no warranty of any kind. We may set different terms for works published later; doing so takes nothing away from what you have already downloaded, which stays under the terms it carried at the time.