January 2009 Archives

After reading Presentation Zen I became interested in finding places to search for free quality images online.  Last week I realized that I had a pretty nice list saved in my bookmarks and it seemed a shame to keep that to myself.  This list does focus on free, public domain or Creative Commons licensed images, but I have nothing against paying for quality stock photography either.  As a matter of fact I've purchased some credits over on iStockphoto that have come in handy on occasions when I can't find exactly the right image using other sources (which is also a highly recommended site if you don't mind paying a little).

But focusing on free stock images I often don't need to go as far as stock.xchange.  I've had my account on stock.xchange for a long time, but I recently "rediscovered" it after I read Presentation Zen and was interested in good stock photo sources.  There are plenty of free high resolution images to download, and some of them of excellent quality.  Searching the site is pretty easy, and you are able to favorites to your account.

If you're looking for public domain images try morgueFile, the images here are free and completely available for use as stock photography.  There's keyword search as well as an advanced search.

Another good free search is Image * After.  I recommend Image * After for stock photography, but it's also a good source for free textures. 

The Multicolor Search Lab is an excellent search tool for discovering images based on color, and with a little advanced trick it's easy to get the exact color you're looking for too.  Let's say you want images for specific color in your palette, just embed the hex number at the end of the search string:  http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolour#colors=201974;  You can even add more than one color for even more control over the color options:  http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolour#colors=201974,842959;  You may add up to 10 colors in the search.  The images are from alamy stock photography which does include some licensed as well as royalty free images.

Then if you're looking for a meta search site, everystockphoto includes some of the ones I already mention including Flickr and a few others I didn't mention.

Of course Flickr is an excellent source of images, but if you decide to use images from Flickr it's good to understand and respect Creative Commons licensing when choosing photos.  What's nice about Flickr is that its API allows many developers to create some pretty awesome search tools based on the site.

One very cool search tool is the Content Based Visual Image Search.  This tool unfortunately doesn't allow you to narrow your search by license type, so it's very possible your searches will yield a photo with a restrictive license, but it's a great site for showcasing what's possible with the Flickr API.  The search tool lets you browse by tag, and when you find an image you like you can search again by that image's theme or by color/texture.  I found it fun to play around with the options, it's too bad there isn't more options for refining the searches though.

Flickr.Storm is a Flickr search that does let you filter by license.  I find the interface a little strange, but it does a good job and returns a set of nice images based on tag from Flickr.  The advanced search allows you to narrow to a specific Creative Commons license which is useful if you know exactly what license will suit your needs.

As Flickr searches go I definitely saved the best for last though, and that is compfight.  The quality of images returned are excellent, the interface is excellent, and it will allow you to filter for Creative Commons.  There's an added feature of a blue band that pops up when you mouse over the results that displays the image's original dimensions, very helpful if you're looking for an image of a specific or relative size. 

I really found this list helpful when searching for images for presentations, and I've started using it more in basic web designs I'm considering for my class and personal use.  Even if you're looking for something to spice up a blog post, you're not going to have too much trouble finding the perfect image from one of these sites.

-UPDATE-

I closed the comments to this post recently due to comment spam, but @mir_b gave me a link to Roy Tennant's FreeLargePhotos.com site.  Thanks mb and thanks to Roy for putting this together!  Definitely another great site for the list.

I just finished up the audio version of Malcolm Gladwell's recent book, Outliers, and I found it really interesting.  I can see why Gladwell's current book has been taken with some controversy, he basically tries to debunk the hard work and toil, rags to riches success will pay scenarios that is a mantra to many, and a particularly familiar one to Americans... it is his theory that success is as much part luck as it is hard work.

The book is a collection of really interesting stories, to me they're stories that are plausible and fascinating, and they kept my interest.  Nothing truly surprised me (well one thing did, a statistic that I mention later), but a lot of things made say, "huh, that sort of makes sense."  I think it's up to the reader to take it at face value or not.

I was particularly struck by the fun connections Gladwell made to birthdays and success.  I even found myself relating with the connection that children held back a year from starting school do better than children who start school right away...  My birthday falling in September made me one of those children when my education began, and I was not in the category of children held back a year, making me the youngest in my class.  I always wondered why two of my good friends, both in a class below me and weeks older than I was were particularly smarter, honor students, and one Salutatorian of his class.  A lot of my friends are smart, I never felt jealous of this situation, I was pretty well aware of my strengths at a young age and recognizing I didn't have have to be intelligent at everything happened to be one of them... to me then it was still an interesting curiosity, and now it sort of makes sense, they were just given a different opportunity than I was.  I was also shocked to discover that only 11% of children in my category, the children who are not held a year, even attend college, something I had done, which puts me in this small group of college graduates that I was never aware existed.  Being the youngest in my class was a struggle, school in general was a struggle for me, and always has been, and neither one of these things were ever overlooked by me... I suppose I just never made the connections between them.  I do know other situations certainly make up for any disadvantages I may have been handed by being the youngest in my class, and that some combination of this and some combination of other things make me who I am, and somebody I've always been proud to be.  It doesn't make me better off or worse off, it's just like little puzzle pieces that fall into place, you feel better having some insight you didn't have before.

The other story I was interested in was the opening on cultural heritage and the settlers of Kentucky.  This fascinated me mostly because the lineage followed very closely to my own.  My father's side of the family migrated from the British Isles then to Virginia and settled in Kentucky about the same time.  I'm not sure if they were caught up in any of the feuding mentioned in the book (but now I'm fascinated to know for sure!) but it definitely gave me a different perspective of what life might have been like for my family and my own cultural heritage.  The point in the book is that these settlers have a cultural legacy of honor that even today is intrinsically followed by those living in the South, despite modern circumstances.  Now of course one branch of my father's family migrated north, to Toledo, starting with my Great Grandfather as well as my Great Grandmother, so I did not grow up in the South, but I wonder how much of that culture of honor is present in me, or how growing up in the North shaped it differently.  I do find these things quite fascinating to think about! 

The stories in the book are success stories told in a way you don't hear the stories told, and for me at least they made me think (of course two of which did hit particularly close to personal experience so that could've had a lot of reason for that).  I did enjoy the audio book version of this one, it was read by Malcolm Gladwell and there was also a small interview at the end of the book.  This book won't give you any answers about success, I'm not sure that's what it sets out to do, but it might make you think about it differently than you did before.

Just a little cross-posting, I wrote a book review for Gene Smith's book on tagging over on the Refresh Detroit blog.  If the topic interests you be sure to check out the review and the book (don't want to spoil the end of the review, but the book is recommended!)

Refresh Detroit >> Tagging:  People Powered Metadata for the Social Web

I initially wrote it as an assignment for my Information Architecture class last semester, but pared it down some for the blog.  We'll see if my last semester lends itself to doing more things like this, hopefully my schedule won't be so bad with both of my classes being online.  I do want to have more time to read again!

Yeah, it's been awhile... but not quite a month.  Truth is I don't have much to say.  I've been enjoying a very nice couple of weeks of no school and no work with absolutely no regrets.  I still have a few more days before I start work, and a few more before I start school back up again for my last semester at Wayne State.  This semester I'm taking two online courses, Web Development and Integrated Library Systems... hopefully they won't be as stressful as the last semester was for me.

I try to avoid New Year's Resolutions because I'm bad about keeping them, but I have to admit that I do get pretty motivated this time of year.  I have a lot to do, and things have been an organizational mess for a little too long so I'm working on those areas before the motivation dies... which it will eventually, that's just how things are with me.

To start I've decided to go through my books.  I probably don't have a lot compared to a lot of librarian type people (I don't read fiction much, and I don't buy books much), but I have enough that I've decided to weed them and organize them.  First step is to decide which I'm keeping.  My long stagnant LibraryThing account has been resurrected.  What I like about LibraryThing is that it pulls in the call numbers from Library of Congress, I've been writing these inside the covers to eventually label them properly (I think I can work some magic with Excel and Word to automate this with some labels).  I've decided to use Library of Congress instead of Dewey only because I have a lot of Classical music CDs and sheet music that will also get labeled and I think Dewey is pretty horrible for cataloging CDs, I would like these items to be relatively close to one another in order so I can find them easier.  At one time I did want to teach flute lessons, thus the reason for organizing my music, I probably never will, but I still like the idea of having them in order.  This probably makes me a huge geek on so many levels though, and to think I really don't like "real cataloging" all the much it seems funny I want to do this at home, but LibraryThing makes it really easy.  Right now most of the books I have added to LT are my old music textbooks, that was just the first shelf I grabbed.

So what to do with the others?  I've opened a PaperBack Swap account.  I don't have much there yet (ok, it's been harder than I thought to part with some books), but the great thing was the first day I posted books I had a request for one!  I mailed it off yesterday, it was a pretty nice book about making and playing folk instruments so I hope they enjoy it.  The really old and really useless books will probably get recycled, I do have a few old workbooks that I don't know why I've kept them for so long.  I've never been one to sell off my textbooks, this has come to my benefit, especially last semester when in a desperate attempt to find resources last minute I found the best in an an old Library textbook... you just never know.

In the meantime I also want to rip all of my CDs to my backup drive, and I'm ditching the cases in favor of a sleeved binder.  I might buy another binder just for the Classical CDs though.

And yes, I do hope to blog more.  Maybe I should be less ambitious than once a day... maybe once a week is ok.  And if not once a week I seem to do ok with once a month.