The ORL Database of Faces
from cam.orl.uk:
Our Database of Faces, (formerly 'The ORL Database of Faces'), contains a set of face images taken between April 1992 and April 1994 at the lab. The database was used in the context of a face recognition project carried out in collaboration with the Speech, Vision and Robotics Group of the Cambridge University Engineering Department.
i spent some time looking for scientific face databases for drawing reference/out of curiosity only to find that most of them 1) require you to email someone from the university and 2) stipulate that they have to be used for non-commercial research purposes. this one was freely available but only in .pgm format. you can download the original .pgm zip file here. for those of us who don't use unix, i converted the pictures into pngs and snuggled them up in a zip file you can download here (downloads start automatically).
there's 400 images in the zip file (40 subjects, 10 photos each). here's some gifs i made with the faces:
you could definitely find a higher quality, more diverse facial database online (here's one), but i wanted to preserve this one just because i noticed the links on the original site were starting to break and it's in a weird file format and it's a very specific group of people from a very specific period in time. i'm sure there are other people on neocities who share my obscure and specific data-hoarding tendencies, so for those people, here's another obscure and specific thing.
of course, full credit to AT&T Laboratories Cambridge. don't use for commercial purposes.