To cite an image you need the creator, the date, the title, the type of image and where you found it: a website and URL, or a museum and city. APA, MLA and Chicago arrange those pieces differently. The examples below use one real painting, Grant Wood’s American Gothic, and one invented photograph on a placeholder site. Swap in the details of your own image.
Quick templates
| Style | Reference format for an online image | In the text |
|---|---|---|
| APA 7 | Creator, A. A. (Year). Title of image [Photograph]. Site Name. URL | (Creator, Year) |
| MLA 9 | Creator Last, First. Title of Image. Year. Website Name, URL. | (Creator) |
| Chicago 17 (bibliography) | Creator Last, First. Title of Image. Year. Medium. Location or Website Name. URL. | Numbered footnote |
What you need before you start
- Creator. The photographer, artist or designer. On photo sites this may be a username.
- Title, or a few words describing the image if it has none.
- Date the image was made or published.
- Type or medium: photograph, painting, map, infographic, oil on canvas.
- Where it is. The website name and the URL of the page that shows the image, or the museum and its city.
How to cite an image in APA 7
APA lists the creator as the author. The title is in italics and sentence case, followed by a description of the format in square brackets, such as [Photograph], [Painting], [Map] or [Infographic].
A photo or picture from a website
Rivera, J. (2024). Street market at dusk [Photograph]. Example Travel Journal. https://www.example.org/street-market
An artwork in a museum
Give the museum and its location as the source. Add the URL if you viewed the work on the museum’s website.
Wood, G. (1930). American gothic [Painting]. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/6565/american-gothic
In-text citation
- Parenthetical: (Wood, 1930)
- Narrative: Wood (1930) painted the pair in front of a farmhouse…
These follow the artwork reference examples on the APA Style site.
How to cite an image in MLA 9
MLA gives the creator, the title in italics and title case, and the date. For an image viewed online, the website follows in italics as the container, then the URL without https://.
An image viewed online
Wood, Grant. American Gothic. 1930. Art Institute of Chicago, www.artic.edu/artworks/6565/american-gothic.
Rivera, Jordan. Street Market at Dusk. 2024. Example Travel Journal, www.example.org/street-market.
An artwork viewed in person
Wood, Grant. American Gothic. 1930, Art Institute of Chicago.
Add the city after the museum when it is not already part of the museum’s name.
In-text citation
Use the creator’s last name, with no page number: (Wood). The MLA Style Center page on citing an image has more examples.
How to cite an image in Chicago 17
Chicago says artworks and photographs can often be cited in your sentence or in a caption alone. When your instructor wants a note and a bibliography entry, give the creator, the title in italics, the date, the medium and the location, then a URL if you viewed it online. Dimensions are optional.
Footnote
1. Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930, oil on beaver board, Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/6565/american-gothic.
Shortened note (later citations)
2. Wood, American Gothic.
Bibliography entry
Wood, Grant. American Gothic. 1930. Oil on beaver board. Art Institute of Chicago. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/6565/american-gothic.
For a photo published on a website, the site takes the place of the museum:
Rivera, Jordan. Street Market at Dusk. 2024. Photograph. Example Travel Journal. https://www.example.org/street-market.
Chicago’s 18th edition, published in 2024, keeps the same elements. Check which edition your course follows.
Figure captions and in-text citations
If you only discuss an image, an in-text citation and a reference entry are enough. If you reproduce the image in your paper, it also needs a figure number and a caption.
| Style | Caption for a reproduced image |
|---|---|
| APA 7 | Figure 1 and an italic title go above the image. Below it: Note. From Street Market at Dusk [Photograph], by J. Rivera, 2024, Example Travel Journal (https://www.example.org/street-market). CC BY 4.0. |
| MLA 9 | Below the image: Fig. 1. Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930, Art Institute of Chicago. |
| Chicago 17 | Below the image: Figure 1. Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930. Oil on beaver board. Art Institute of Chicago. |
In APA, the note ends with the licence or a copyright statement, and the image still gets a reference list entry. In MLA, a caption that gives the full source details can stand in for a Works Cited entry if you do not cite the image anywhere else. In every style, refer to the image in your sentence by its number, as in “see Figure 1”.
Image with no author, date or title
| Missing | APA 7 | MLA 9 | Chicago 17 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creator | Use the organisation or username. If there is none, start with the title. | Start with the title or description. | Start with the title or description. |
| Date | (n.d.) | Leave it out and add “Accessed Day Month Year.” at the end. | Use n.d. and add an access date before the URL. |
| Title | Describe the image in square brackets, not in italics. | Give a plain description, with no italics or quotation marks. | Give a plain description, with no italics. |
An untitled photo in APA and in MLA looks like this:
Rivera, J. (2024). [Photograph of a street market at dusk]. Example Travel Journal. https://www.example.org/street-market
Rivera, Jordan. Photograph of a street market at dusk. Example Travel Journal, 2024, www.example.org/street-market.
Google Images, stock photos and AI images
An image found through Google Images
Do not cite Google. It is a search tool, and the thumbnail in the results is not the source. Click through to the page that hosts the image, collect the creator, date and title there, and cite that site. If the image appears inside an article, you can cite the article and refer to the image in your sentence. For the page format, see how to cite a website.
A stock photo
Read the licence first. APA says that when a stock image or clip art licence states that no attribution is required, you need no reference, in-text citation or copyright note. When attribution is required, cite it like any other image and name the licence in the figure note:
Rivera, J. (2023). Student working at a laptop [Stock image]. Example Stock. https://www.example.com/photos/student-laptop
MLA and Chicago have no special rule for stock photos. Use the online image formats above, and follow any credit line the licence asks for.
An AI-generated image
There is no human creator to name, so the tool and your prompt identify the image. MLA uses a description of the prompt as the title, then the tool, version, company, date and URL, in the caption or in Works Cited:
“Pointillist painting of a sheep in a sunny field of blue flowers” prompt. DALL-E, version 2, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, labs.openai.com/.
APA has published a format for generative AI tools but not one specific to images. The usual adaptation credits the company as author and describes the tool in brackets, as in “OpenAI. (2023). DALL-E (Version 2) [Text-to-image model]”, followed by the URL, with the prompt given in the figure note. In Chicago, credit the image in its caption with the tool, the date and the prompt. Ask your instructor what they expect, and whether AI images are allowed at all. Our guide on how to cite ChatGPT covers AI-generated text.
Citing an image is not the same as having permission
Reproducing an image in a paper you hand in to a class is usually treated differently from publishing it. For a thesis that will be deposited, a blog post, a slide deck you share or anything commercial, check the licence or ask the copyright holder. Public domain and Creative Commons images are the simplest to reuse, and Creative Commons licences still require the credit they specify. See also how to avoid plagiarism.
Format your references faster
The Plagiarism Checker Plus citation generator is free and formats references in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, AMA and ACS from the details you enter. It has source types for websites, books, journal articles and videos, and no separate type for images. For an online image, enter the creator, date, title, site and URL under the website type, then add the image-specific parts from this guide by hand: the bracketed description in APA, italics for the title in MLA, and the medium in Chicago.
Read every generated reference against the templates above before you hand it in. For moving images, see how to cite a YouTube video.