Metropolitan Museum of Art

About Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API provides RESTful access, in JSON format, to open access data covering more than 470,000 artworks in the Museum's collection. Data is released under a Creative Commons Zero license, permitting unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use, and includes identifying data for artworks still under copyright. Corresponding high-resolution JPEG images are available for works in the public domain.

The API exposes endpoints for listing all valid object IDs, retrieving a full record for a given object, listing museum departments, and searching objects by keyword, title, or subject tags. Object records include fields such as title, artist and constituent information, culture, period, dynasty, medium, accession details, and image URLs. Requests can be filtered by department ID or by a metadata update date.

No registration or API key is required to use the service, though request rates are limited to 80 per second. It is suited to developers building applications, research tools, or datasets that draw on the Museum's collection metadata and imagery.

Key features

• REST API access to over 470,000 artworks in The Met's collection
• Search endpoint supporting queries by title, tags, department, and date
• High-resolution public domain images available in JPEG format
• Detailed object metadata including artist, culture, period, medium, and measurements
• Departments endpoint listing all museum curatorial departments
• Open Access data released under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license

Frequently asked questions