The museums of Paris now kindly offer a royalty-free image filter on their online collection. My test search for chat (cats, felines) gave 376 results, from what are said to be 150,000 newly uploaded CC0 images. These are the filters you want to find CC0 + ‘has an image online’…

I find it’s possible to set the site to use English, but that version is not fully translated. “Image libre de droit seulement” is still present in the supposedly English interface. “Datation” is obvious and allows you to set a date-range.

A right-click / “open in new tab” on the “Voir/See” button then takes you to the item’s record page with a download link. Download links are public (i.e. without a sign-up or other obfuscation), start quickly, and my test image came inside the .ZIP format.

In my first test I had a 4k 300dpi .JPG, at 6.5Mb. Nice. A few more tests shows the same thing, and the scans are clean and crisp. I downloaded about ten .ZIPs, some simultaneously, and did not encounter wait times or a ‘daily limit’ pop-up.

The keyword relevance is a bit off, though, being overly broad. For instance, chat also finds chatiments (punishments), which may cause chuckles among schoolkids encountering spankings and canings while doing innocuous homework on ‘kittees from history’…

Thankfully the results produced nothing more shocking than that, which was a surprise give the goriness of the French revolutions and the pungency of their satirical arts.