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Images of Congress

DOI

Public domain images of members of the US Congress.

Using the photos

Photos are available at predictable URLs, by size and Bioguide ID. Photos are served using GitHub Pages.

https://theunitedstates.io/images/congress/[size]/[bioguide].jpg

[size] can be one of:

  • original - As originally downloaded. Typically, 675x825, but it can vary.
  • 450x550
  • 225x275

[bioguide] must be a Bioguide ID. These are unique IDs for members of Congress, as defined by the Congressional Bioguide. They can be found and connected to many other Congressional datasets, including the partner dataset over at unitedstates/congress-legislators.

Note: Our HTTPS permalinks are provided through CloudFlare's Universal SSL, which also uses "Flexible SSL" to talk to GitHub Pages' unencrypted endpoints. So, you should know that it's not an end-to-end encrypted channel, but is encrypted between your client use and CloudFlare's servers (which at least should dissociate your requests from client IP addresses).

Downloading all images of a particular size

If you want to quickly grab all images of a particular size without cloning the entire repo (and have svn installed), you can just do something like this:

svn checkout https://github.com/unitedstates/images/trunk/congress/225x275

Gathering more photos

GitHub Actions status codecov

This project uses a Python script that scrapes the Government Printing Office's Member Guide for official photos of Members of Congress. You can run the script to find and fetch new photos.

Install dependencies with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the script with:

./scripts/gpo_member_photos.py

Contributing other photos

If GPO doesn't have a photo for someone in their member guide, we may be willing to accept a photo from another source.

In this case, open a ticket, and include:

  • The name and Bioguide ID of the member of Congress.
  • A link to the image you're suggesting we incorporate, and to a page that displays that image.
  • Why you believe the image is definitely official and in the public domain.

Public domain

The photos of members of Congress are from the Government Printing Office, which has assured us that all photos are public domain.

All other files in this project are dedicated to the public domain. As spelled out in CONTRIBUTING:

The project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.