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The Metropolitan Museum of Art Makes 375,000 Images Available For Free (fortune.com)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Tuesday that more than 375,000 of its "public-domain artworks" are now available for unrestricted use. "We have been working toward the goal of sharing our images with the public for a number of years," said Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Met, in a statement. "Our comprehensive and diverse museum collection spans 5,000 years of world culture and our core mission is to be open and accessible for all who wish to study and enjoy the works of art in our care." Fortune reports: The image collection covers photographs, paintings, and sculptures, among other works. Images now available for both scholarly and commercial purposes include Emanuel Leutze's famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware; photographs by Walker Evans, Alfred Steiglitz, and Dorothea Lange; and even some Vincent van Gogh paintings. The Met has teamed up with Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Artstor, Digital Public Library of America, Art Resource, and Pinterest to host and maximize the reach of their enormous collection. There is also a public GitHub repository of the images.
there are no images at the github, only metadata
No, "public domain" means use of the works isn't legally restricted. It doesn't mean anyone actually has access to it.
There are no doubt films in studio archives that are no longer covered by copyright for one reason or other, but they have particular reason to dig them out and transcode them. And certainly there are many works in museums that predate copyright altogether that are not available to outsiders. If the museum staff takes a picture of a public domain picture, the resulting picture of a picture is probably at least claimed to by under copyright, so that does the public no good either.
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I think you're meant to go through the website, and download the images from there. The photography looks to be high quality, and fairly high resolution-- though not spectacularly so.
For example:
The Death of Socrates. Click on "download", and you'll receive a a 3811 × 2528 pixels JPEG.
Armor Garniture of George Clifford (1558–1605), Third Earl of Cumberland. You can download a 1457 × 1861 JPEG.
As far as metadata is concerned-- the EXIF contains a link back to the catalog page. Camera specific metadata has been stripped.