A photograph of Their Majesties in the Lords Chamber on 13th May, acquired through the United States embassy and therefore presumed to be public domain.

The May-June period tends to be quite a busy one in terms of grand royal ceremonies with equestrian components: In the past few weeks we’ve had the State Opening of Parliament, the Trooping of the Colour, the installation of Knights of the Garter and the races at Ascot. The first two events have, in recent years, been a good opportunity to get free-licence photographs of the senior royals for Wikimedia Commons. This year, unfortunately, the pickings have been quite slim.

For the state opening, the official House of Lords photographs have been uploaded to Flickr as “All Rights Reserved”. Those from the House of Commons are Non-Commercial No-Derivatives. The only ones I’ve actually been able to find and upload are a quartet from the Instagram account of the United States Embassy. There were also three photographs of the procession along the Mall taken by Alansplodge.

For Trooping the Colour, the Government Flickr accounts which took so many photographs in 2023, -4, and -5 have not taken any this year, so we are reliant on the generosity of digital marketing consultant John Pannell. He also got a lot of snaps at the event in 2022.

Pannell’s shot of the Princess of Wales in a landau with her sons. Princess Charlotte is either obscured or out-of-frame throughout the album.

Neither Garter Day nor Ascot usually get covered by government photographers so free-licence photographs of those events are restricted to the occasional shots by amateurs who release their own work. Of course, in the case of Garter Day it is only the procession which can be photographed at all while the rest takes place inside the castle, though on this occasion we did get a verbal account from the Since Attlee & Churchill podcast.

It is worth mentioning that though the Buckingham Palace Flickr account quietly stopped posting back in 2018, there is a separate feed from Kensington Palace with albums for three of these four events. Of course, these are also All Rights Reserved and thus out of bounds for Wikimedia.