The Manar al-Athar open-access photo-archive http://www.manar-al-athar.ox.ac.uk (based at the University of Oxford) aims to provide high resolution, searchable images, freely-downloadable for teaching, research, heritage projects, and publication. It covers buildings and art in the areas of the former Roman empire which later came under Islamic rule (e.g. Syro-Palestine/the Levant, Arabia, Egypt, and North Africa), from ca. 300 BC to the present, but especially Roman, late antique, and early Islamic art, architecture, and sacred sites.

Many of the monuments are now inaccessible to the West making this archive an important long-term resource for research, with downloadable high resolution images which are not watermarked. The records of monuments which are damaged or destroyed will also play a vital role in future restoration. Low resolution copies of these photographs for Powerpoint make them readily suitable for classroom use and demonstrating the shared heritage of the regions covered and the West. The images download with the caption, etc. and credit line in the metadata.
The archive has over 17,000 images already online, as of September 2015. Material is labelled in both English and Arabic to facilitate regional use, with the main instructions also available in some other languages.