Web Worker Daily

Whether you design web sites for a living, put together product brochures, or just maintain a blog, you’re likely to find yourself wanting to incorporate pictures as part of your web work. Unless you’re a photographer, this means finding images from other people - and most critically, finding images that you can legally use.

Just finding an image you like on the web and downloading it is a recipe for disaster (or at least lawbreaking). Remember, photographs are copyrighted the moment they are taken. This means that it’s not enough to look for a photo that appears to be OK for you to use. To be truly safe, you need to find images with explicit licenses that give you the rights to use them (Creative Commons licenses being the most common these days). Fortunately, there are good ways to quickly locate images that are OK for you to use.Stock.XCHNG is the best site I know of for finding free stock photography - they’ve got over 350,000 free photos online at the moment. You can browse by category or search by keyword to find images you like, and just about any search I’ve tried has returned multiple high-quality images. The site’s default license agreement is very broad, making the bulk of the images safe to reuse, and their image browser is quick. This should be your first port of call when hunting images.

Flickr should be familiar to everyone, and it’s a good starting point for finding images that you can use. The key to using Flickr to find reusable photos is to go through the advanced search page. Here you can specify that you only want Creative Commons-licensed content returned, and further limit that to content you can use commercially, if that’s what you want.

A new site, compfight, manages to offer a better Flickr search than Flickr itself - at least, if your goal is to visually scan a lot of potential photos quickly. It uses the Flickr API, and lets you toggle Creative Commons search right under its search box. Results are returned on thumbnail pages, 250 to a page. If you find one you like, a click will get you to its Flickr page to check the licensing details.

Openphoto is a wiki-based photography site. Anyone can register and upload images. All images on the site are required to be under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike by default). As a user, you can browse or search by tags to find the photos that you want. Each image is very clearly marked with the required attribution information. One thing to watch out for: their search engine also returns images from the Dreamstime stock photography site, which are generally not free.

Stockvault is another site of free photos - though their terms of use specify free for non-commercial use only. You can search by keyword or browse through a category tree to see photos. Like Openphoto, they also include Dreamstime results in their searches.

The Flickr Related Tag Browser, from Airtight Interactive, is a sometimes-useful supplement to Flickr search. It lets you search for photos by tag, but crucially, it shows you related tags after the search. If you’re having trouble finding the images that you want, following the tag trails this way can help you hone in on ones that actually have a reasonable number of photos available.

One final thing to keep in mind as you search for images that you can use: always read the actual license accompanying a photo that you’re thinking about downloading. The various searches aren’t perfect, and not every Creative Commons license is suitable for every potential use. And do remember to always give credit where credit is due.

Opening photo credit: Stock.XCHNG user lusi.