Since the birth of the digital camera, there has certainly never a shortage of imagery. In fact, Yahoo! estimates we'll take 880 billion digital photos in 2014. Our challenge has never been a lack of choice -- it's locating precisely the image we want in this vast ocean of imagery. As Coleridge wrote "Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.”.
Of course, it can often depend on the kind of image you seek. If you're looking for commonly photographed objects such as computers, books, or flowers, you shouldn't have to search long to find dozens of good ones.
However, try searching for less common objects, or for abstract concepts -- perhaps a sunny day or a particular type of flower -- and it can get tougher. Part of the difficulty stem from the fact that even a perfect image, it may not be tagged in a way that allows you to find it.
In these cases you can waste a lot of time on various sites with free images and still leave empty-handed. Ouch. This explains why commercial stock agencies advertise on free image sites -- their search facilities is often worth the up-sell. In order to avoid this as much as possible, you might want to try a free image search engine.
Free image search engines
The advantage of these search engines for free images is that they (in theory) search multiple sites with free images at once. However, in practice some of these search engines search just a bunch of sites, not dozens of them. Anyway, it's more than nothing but if you hope these image search engines are a blessing, you'd better get realistic.
It's hard to compare the quality of the 7 search engines included in the article. At first I wanted to run the same queries through all of them and compare the results.
However, after I tried some very popular terms (computers in particular) and got thousands of results from some of the engines as well as no results for some not so popular terms (probably because I simply didn't use the right keywords), I decided that such a test would give misleading results.
What's more, these search engines index new images daily, so even if today there is not a single image for “sunny day”, for example, tomorrow dozens of such images might get added and my conclusions will be wrong. Therefore, I won't be comparing the quality of the search for these 7 engines – I will just list my impressions with them, as well as some facts, such as the number of photos they include in the search or the sites they search.
Before we go on with the search engines themselves, here is a word of advice. Even if in the search results you find images labeled as free for commercial use, always check the source site itself for the latest version of the license. It's not unheard of images that were licensed as free but later the author had second thoughts and modified the license. Because of this, always check the license before you use the image.
1. Google Images
For many of us, Google Images is the first (and frequently the only) choice to find free images that are allowed for commercial use as well. In order to take advantage of Google Images, after you type your keywords in the search box and hit Enter, click the Images tab (1).
Continue reading %The 7 Best Search Engines for Finding Free Images%
by Ada Ivanoff via SitePoint
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