Thank you for visiting MormonImages.com — a growing library of independently produced artwork covering Mormon history, doctrine, and current events. My name is Tim Schreiber, and I'm an active — yet nuanced — member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I'm not ex-Mormon, anti-Mormon, or post-Mormon; I haven't left the church; and I don't intend to. The work on this site comes from inside the tradition, not outside it.
“Independently produced” means that every image on this site has been created, generated, or contributed from outside the LDS Church's correlated visual program — not commissioned by the Mormon Church, not sourced from its archives, not designed to align with its approved narrative. “Library” means it grows: new images go up regularly, and the back catalog keeps getting deeper. “Mormon history, doctrine, and current events” means the scope is wide on purpose — early Restoration scenes, polygamy-era families, the temple's evolving rituals, twentieth-century policy shifts, the SEC settlement, and the ongoing child-abuse litigation all belong here. “Free for personal use” means a parent making a Sunday-school handout, a blogger writing about church history, or a podcaster needing an episode thumbnail can use what they find, as long as they credit it.
Why this site exists
The visual record of Mormonism is overwhelmingly produced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself, and the imagery the LDS Church puts into circulation is rigorously correlated — meaning standardized, vetted, and aligned with a single approved narrative. That correlated record does its sharpest work by what it leaves out. Where official artwork shows a serene Joseph Smith translating the Golden Plates with the Urim and Thummim, you won't see him with his face in a hat, peering at the same seer stone he had previously used for treasure-digging, the plates nowhere to be seen. The polygamy era is largely skipped. The Mountain Meadows Massacre is rarely depicted. The evolving temple endowment, the 1978 priesthood ban and its reversal, the 2015 exclusion policy and its later reversal, the Church's immense wealth, the SEC settlement against the Church and Ensign Peak Advisors, and the litigation around the abuse helpline are never illustrated at all.
The Mormon Church spends enormous resources producing high-quality artwork in service of a sanitized story. A visual vacuum on the other side serves that story just as surely as the artwork itself does. This site is one attempt to put more of the historical and contemporary record into circulation in image form — not as polemic, but as documentary. Some images depict events Latter-day Saints celebrate; some depict events the Church would rather not discuss. Both belong to the same tradition.
How it started
This project grew out of a fun habit I developed while creating my ward's sacrament meeting bulletin. I used non-conventional sources — from coloring books to AI — to give variety to the bulletin covers. At times, those covers pushed the envelope, depicting moments and tones the correlated narrative kept at arms length. Formalizing that work into a public, searchable library had been an idea I had kicking around in my head for a while.
Why now
In April 2026, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints filed a federal lawsuit against John Dehlin and the Open Stories Foundation, alleging both trademark and copyright infringement against the long-running Mormon Stories podcast. The trademark angle — use of the word “Mormon,” similar fonts and colors — gets most of the headlines. The piece that matters most to me is the copyright claim: the LDS Church is asserting ownership over some very well-known, widely-used images that have circulated for decades across Church publications, blogs, podcasts, social media, and countless places beyond official channels — and is now using that ownership to go after a critical podcast that used them. That's the part with the broadest chilling effect. Anyone who wants to discuss the Church visually now has to weigh whether the imagery the Mormon Church itself spent decades putting into broad circulation can still safely be used to talk about the Church.
Whatever the outcome, that message is what pushed me to publish. A church that uses copyright to police its own widely-shared imagery has decided to answer dissent by restricting the visual vocabulary of its own tradition. The right response is to put more of that vocabulary back into circulation — independently produced, on terms ordinary people can actually use.
Who can use these images
That's the design choice baked into how this site licenses its work. Private individuals — anyone who wants to discuss, study, teach, or argue about Mormonism — can use everything here freely, with attribution. Organizations cannot. The Personal Use License explicitly excludes commercial entities, nonprofits, educational institutions, government bodies, and religious organizations, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself. Not that the Church would want any of this. But the asymmetry is the point: the LDS Church locks its corpus down and uses copyright to police its boundaries; this corpus opens itself to the people the Church most wants to talk about itself, and closes itself to the institution most invested in controlling that conversation.
A note to independent voices in the Mormon space
If you're John Dehlin, or anyone else doing serious independent work on or around Mormonism — a podcaster, writer, scholar, artist, advocate, journalist, or organizer whose project falls outside what the personal-use license covers — your free commercial-and-nonprofit-use license is waiting. Get in touch and we can hash out the details. You're the people this library is here to support.
How to use the site
Browse by tag or search, and use what you find under the Personal Use License — free for private individuals, with the required attribution to me and to MormonImages.com. If you'd like to discuss a use the personal license doesn't cover, request a topic, or contribute, please get in touch.
— Tim Schreiber, creator of MormonImages.com