Helsinkiphotos.fi is an image service that provides a user-friendly way to access the Helsinki City Museum’s vast collection of photographs. At Helsinkiphotos.fi, anyone can browse, search and download detailed, high resolution photographs suitable for print materials or lower resolution images more suitable for web and social media use.

The photographs in the service are published under Creative Commons BY 4.0 license. In brief, CC BY means that you may use and edit the photographs for any purpose as long as you credit the source of the photograph, in this case Helsinki City Museum and the photographer. The photographs may be used commercially, with certain restrictions. For instance, a person’s right to decide on the commercial use of their name, photograph or other identifiable part of their identity, privacy protection rights and moral rights may limit the use of the material.

The Helsinkiphotos.fi service also allows users to conduct Finnish-language searches, browse curated photo albums or create their own albums by logging into the service.

Currently, the service has approximately 65,000 digitized photographs. More images are being digitized and added to the system constantly. If you need a digital image that is not currently found in the Helsinkiphotos.fi service, please contact the museum’s Picture Browsery.

The photographs of the Helsinki City Museum collection are still available in the national Finna service at hkm.finna.fi. In addition to photographs, you can also browse other material related to Helsinki in Finna, everything from plastic bags to hairdryers and bus tickets to works of art. You can also search the history of the buildings of Helsinki.