Saturday, November 7, 2026 · Customer reviews of US businesses
The Fair Hearing score
Bad
11 reviews
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Honesty, pricing, process and quality scores appear once 5 customers have rated them.
Public domain image search. Vintage posters, postcards, manuscripts, photographs.
Picryl (picryl.com) has 11 customer reviews on The Fair Hearing, with an average rating of 1.6 out of 5.
11 approved reviews, newest moderated first
picryl will take your annual subscription and still won't let you view past the first page of images without asking for donations and blurring all the rest of the images the same as if you had no subscription at all they are cheats don't subscribe
By Steve S.
Company sent horrible prints very blurry and pixelated. They stated they would only do 50% refund till I got the credit card company involved. They then sent a nasty email in return. You would do better getting prints from a old dot matrix printer then this company
By mackb
They suggest they provide a free service, but after sucking you in and and getting you to invest some time, they require money. It would be OK if they made it clear at first that there were charges, registrations, sharing of your data, and so on. They have joined all the scammers on the Internet with deceptive claims.
By T. T. A.
being a paid site does make it low quality, from the main content point of view it is a high quality reputable site with high quality content
By israa N.
Picryl was a great free resource for historical images. Sadly it now requires payment to view more than three pages per search. I used to use it for (credited) images for my free community magazine but this is no longer an option. Extremely disappointed.
By Marnie D.
A lot of these negative reviews express annoyance that the public domain images are no longer free. I'm not looking forward to joining either, but just because the images are public domain doesn't mean that collecting, scanning, uploading etc. is also free. I'm not sure if Picryl is making a killing from the site by asking for a member's fee, but the people who get up in the morning to go maintain the site, gather new images and restore / enhance image quality for reproduction grade images deserve a decent salary. It's a site that has no advertising to pay its bills.
By Silver T.
Free does not mean free. US institutions have signed up to let these guys hold images for payment.Should be illegal. Public domain means AVAILABLE to everyone.
By Diana
I am happy with the multitude of images of all types. Opening every page was like opening a present. However, Picryl has ruined the "free" experience by slapping on a charge button - Upgrade - and that makes it no longer free if you wish to continue accessing images. And the screen is locked & blurred for any further use in that session. Disappointed like others.
By Pj
