Royal Museums Greenwich Picture Library
The Royal Museums Greenwich Picture Library, operating online as RMG Images, is the image licensing service of Royal Museums Greenwich, the group that runs the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the Queen's House and the clipper ship Cutty Sark. Based in Greenwich, London, it describes itself as the world's greatest source of historical maritime images, and it licenses high-resolution pictures from collections covering exploration, navigation, fine art, time, war, space and astronomy. Around forty-five thousand images are available through its website, with many more held in the underlying museum collections. For publishers, broadcasters, film-makers and news organisations, it is the authoritative source for pictures of Britain's seafaring past and of the science of time and navigation.
The museums behind the library
Royal Museums Greenwich brings together four visitor attractions on a single historic site within the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. The National Maritime Museum, established by Act of Parliament in 1934 and opened in 1937 in the former Royal Hospital School buildings, is the largest museum of its kind, devoted to Britain's relationship with the sea. The Queen's House, designed by Inigo Jones and completed in the 1630s, is an architectural landmark in its own right and displays the museum's art collection. The Royal Observatory, founded by Charles II in 1675 to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea, is the home of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian. Cutty Sark, the celebrated tea clipper preserved in dry dock at Greenwich since 1954, came under the group's operational management in 2012 and joined the national collection grouping in 2015. The Royal Museums Greenwich Foundation, a registered charity, was incorporated in March 2012, and the picture library draws on the collections of all four sites.
Scope of the image collections
The library licenses images of the objects the museums hold, and those holdings are exceptionally broad. They include oil paintings, prints and drawings, maps and charts, scientific instruments, ship plans, historic photographs, film and drone footage, manuscripts, ship models, antiquities and uniforms. Because the parent collections document more than five hundred years of seafaring, the picture library can supply imagery for subjects ranging from Tudor and Stuart navigation to the age of steam, the golden age of ocean liners and cruise travel, and the two world wars at sea. It also holds material on subjects of continuing public interest such as the Atlantic slave trade, piracy, exploration and the development of global trade, making it a regular source for documentary producers and publishers working on those themes.
Maritime history, trade and exploration
The maritime holdings are the heart of the service. Researchers can find images of ships and dockyards, figureheads and ships' decorations, naval uniforms, diving equipment, coins, medals and flags, alongside documentation of the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy and of more than five hundred years of Trinity House and safety at sea. The development of sea charts and maps from the medieval period to the present day is covered in depth, reflecting the museum's historic role in navigation. For news media, these collections provide the standard illustrative material for anniversaries of naval battles, features on famous vessels, stories about exploration and coverage of maritime heritage, where using an image of the actual object or vessel, supplied by its custodian, carries an authority that a general stock photograph cannot match.
Astronomy, navigation and time
Uniquely among British picture libraries, the Greenwich service also covers the history of astronomy and timekeeping, through the Royal Observatory collections. Its images document around eight hundred years of astronomy, navigation and timekeeping instruments, including historical astrolabes and constellation cards, portraits of Astronomers Royal and celebrated clockmakers such as George Graham and Thomas Earnshaw, and John Harrison's famous marine timekeepers of the eighteenth century, the chronometers that solved the longitude problem. Highlights range from H. Percy Wilkins's Map of the Moon, in its third edition of 1952, to photographs of the Observatory itself, the Prime Meridian line and the time ball. Science and history publishers, broadcasters covering space and astronomy stories, and producers of documentaries about navigation all draw on this material.
Fine art, prints and maps
The Queen's House and the National Maritime Museum together hold Britain's national collection of maritime art, and the picture library is its commercial gateway. Marine paintings, portraiture connected with seafaring and exploration, prints and drawings, and historic maps and charts can all be licensed for reproduction in books, magazines, newspapers and digital products. Maritime art is a staple of illustrated history publishing, and images from Greenwich appear constantly in books on naval warfare, exploration and trade. The library's staff can advise on the best-known works as well as on less familiar material, and its online highlights selections are designed to show editors the range available on popular subjects such as famous ships, exploration, astronomy and time.
Ship plans and historic photographs
Two holdings deserve particular note. The National Maritime Museum holds one of the largest single collections of original ship plans in the world, dating from the early eighteenth century, and the picture library supplies prints, scans and licensed reproductions of them; these technical drawings are used by model-makers, historians, publishers and film and television art departments seeking authentic detail. The historic photograph collections, meanwhile, record ships, ports, dockyards and life at sea from the early days of photography onwards, and include material on subjects from naval warfare to passenger liners. Together, plans and photographs make Greenwich an essential research stop for anyone reconstructing a historic vessel or a maritime event in print or on screen.
How licensing works
The RMG Images website is designed primarily for professional image research and licensing. Registration is free, and registered users can browse the collections, save and share lightboxes of candidate images, and apply and pay for licences online. Around forty-five thousand images are available on the site, and the archive is added to regularly. Where an image has not yet been digitised, the museum's professional photographic studio can provide high-quality digitisation of collection material on request, and the team offers a research assistance service by email for users who cannot find a specific subject. Licences are granted for a wide range of media, including programme making, film production, book publishing, magazine and news production, and digital products such as online content, apps and ebooks, with fees reflecting the use proposed.
Who uses the picture library
The library's customers span the media and cultural industries. Television and film producers use its paintings, plans, photographs and footage to give historical productions visual accuracy. Book and magazine publishers license its art and object photography for history titles and features. News organisations turn to it when maritime or astronomical stories require authoritative archive imagery, from the anniversary of a famous voyage to the restoration of a historic ship. Educators and digital publishers use its material in online content, apps and ebooks. Because the images come with the museum's own cataloguing, users also gain reliable captions and object information, a significant advantage for factual media working to deadline.
Funding the museums and professional memberships
All proceeds generated by Royal Museums Greenwich Images help to fund and support the museum's core activities and its social purpose, including conservation, research, acquisitions, education and exhibition programmes, and free access to the collections. The service offers free use of lower-resolution files for defined non-commercial purposes, such as academic publications with small print runs, theses, educational lectures and personal factual websites, under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, no-derivatives licence where the underlying artwork is out of copyright, with high-resolution files and new photography subject to fees. Professionally, the picture library is a member of the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies, the Museums Intellectual Property Network, the European coordination body CEPIC and the Association for Cultural Enterprises, placing it within the recognised frameworks of the picture industry.
Significance for the media
Among UK agencies and picture libraries, Royal Museums Greenwich holds a position that cannot be replicated by a commercial competitor, because no competitor owns its subject matter. It is simultaneously a museum service, an archive of record for Britain's maritime and astronomical heritage, and a working licensing business supplying the media daily. When British news coverage illustrates the story of longitude, the era of the great clippers, naval history or the origins of standard time, the pictures very often originate in Greenwich and reach the page or screen through this library. Its combination of scholarly cataloguing, digitised access and commercial licensing makes it a model of how a national museum collection functions as part of the modern news and publishing ecosystem.
