https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx I was pleased to discover that the online posting of the coins in the British Museum collection has progressed at least to the point it include my period of interest (Septimius Severus). To use, go to the page linked above and type in key words to see if you can find what you want. Unfortunately, they made some decisions as to how the search works that makes it hard to be too specific. For example, there are rare coins of Septimius with II COS on the reverse but searching for that string also returns anything with COS while omitting the space and searching IICOS returns nothing. I wanted to see their Septimius coin of the rare legion XXII PRI but those letters returned nothing but simplifying it to XXII returned the XXII PRI coin as well as the plain XXII coin with no following letters. What I am telling you is that it will take some practice to find what you are looking for in some cases so you must not assume something is not there just because you can't find it. I have looked for a very few things so far so am not able to guide you except to say they have some really interesting coins there for those willing to search for them.
I discovered this site a few weeks ago. I've had a couple of successful searches, but as you noticed, their search engine is pretty clunky and unpredictable, and I am often frustrated by it. It's going to take some practice.
I wish I had known that it wasn't widely used already. I've been using it constantly since I started collecting. Unfortunately the search facility goes down fairly regularly, so some days you will have no luck even pulling up a result, but when it works it's a treasure trove.
I gave the search a test run. I typed in "Parthian" and it returned quite a list of pictures of that coin. I am well pleased! Thank you @dougsmit
The Advanced Search page stopped working as expected at least six months ago. They know about the problem and say "Please note: We are currently experiencing problems with the advanced search form. If searches do not complete, please use the standard version. We apologise for the inconvenience and are working to find a solution."
I use the database all the time, though the photographs are only so-so, in my opinion. I've had to pay for photography once recently. With reproduction rights it cost about 110 GBP for a coin (both sides). I assume they'll then post this coin to the database.
