Creative Commons Catalog API

Overview

Measurement Record

What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.

Request

GET https://api.openverse.org/v1/images/?q=sunset&license=cc0&page_size=5

Result

HTTP 200 · application/json · 7,421 bytes · compressed

Response time

49 ms (median of 3) · fastest 33 ms

Transport

TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 · certificate issued by Google Trust Services

Browser CORS

Allowed — Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Served by

cloudflare

Recorded

2026-08-10

Fields Returned

Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.

Captured Response

Captured from a real request to https://api.openverse.org/v1/images/?q=sunset&license=cc0&page_size=5 on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.

{
  "result_count": 240,
  "page_count": 48,
  "page_size": 5,
  "page": 1,
  "results": [
    {
      "id": "7ac70a50-98e6-4b72-8a78-b16754f212a7",
      "title": "2018/365/268 Feeding on the Sunset",
      "indexed_on": "2020-03-15T10:32:33.867973Z",
      "foreign_landing_url": "https://www.flickr.com/photos/37996646802@N01/44922356991",
      "url": "https://live.staticflickr.com/1946/44922356991_2646fc617b_b.jpg",
      "creator": "cogdogblog",
      "creator_url": "https://www.flickr.com/photos/37996646802@N01",
      "license": "cc0",
      "license_version": "1.0",
      "license_url": "https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/",
      "provider": "flickr",
      "source": "flickr",
      "category": null,
      "filesize": null,
      "…": "(11 more fields)"
    }
  ]
}

Implementation Example

Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.

const url = "https://api.creativecommons.engineering/";
// Replace headers or query params with the values required by this API.
const response = await fetch(url, {
  headers: {
  "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
  }
});
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);

import requests

url = "https://api.creativecommons.engineering/"
headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=30)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
print(data)

curl "https://api.openverse.org/v1/images/?q=sunset&license=cc0&page_size=5" -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"

What Can You Build?

// Fetch popular open source projects
const headers = { 'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN' };
const response = await fetch(`https://api.creativecommons.engineering`, { headers });
const data = await response.json();
const projects = data.items || data.results || data.projects || [];
const list = Array.isArray(projects) ? projects : [projects];
list.slice(0, 5).forEach(p => {
  console.log(`⭐ ${p.name || p.full_name}: ${p.description || ''}`);
});

// Monitor open source project activity
const headers = { 'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN' };
const response = await fetch(`https://api.creativecommons.engineering`, { headers });
const data = await response.json();
const project = data.repository || data;
console.log('Project:', project.name || project.full_name);
console.log('Stars:', project.stars || project.stargazers_count || 'N/A');
console.log('Forks:', project.forks || project.forks_count || 'N/A');

// Create a showcase of open source projects
const headers = { 'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN' };
const response = await fetch(`https://api.creativecommons.engineering`, { headers });
const data = await response.json();
const projects = data.items || data.results || [];
const container = document.getElementById('showcase');
projects.slice(0, 5).forEach(p => {
  const el = document.createElement('div');
  el.innerHTML = `<h3>${p.name}</h3><p>${p.description || ''}</p>`;
  container.appendChild(el);
});

Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.

How This API Fails

We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.

Common Errors & Troubleshooting

Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.