Recently in search Category

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 love Twitter, and I was already fully aware of the usefulness of the microblogging service in a personal and professional setting, but just now, in a very serendipitous way, I discovered how a combination of Google, Blog Posts, and Twitter can get you exactly the information you need in school research too.  I'm very inspired by this.

I'm putting together one part of a presentation on Usability in Web Design for my Information Architecture class, my particular topic in this presentation is defining and describing what usability is, and I have reached the section where I wanted to talk about some considerations for usability in web design.  I have found some incredible resources, but I sort of got stuck with browser considerations, at least in a very general sort of way that I can sum up for my classmates, with maybe a few very general tools.  I'm talking real basic here... things that librarians can understand without overwhelming them.

Ugh! I know browser compatibility is needlessly complex (thanks to browsers being needlessly non-standards based), I've totally been there, but I didn't realize finding a general article, blog post, anything would be that difficult.  And to be honest with you, I can't even trace my path back to how I initially found this nugget by Jared Spool on UIE (I do know it started with Google and veered in some strange direction after that), but I'm thrilled that I did, and it was even posted yesterday!!

In sum, a client asked Jared if he could recommend an article on designing for specific browsers for one of his clients.  Jared admitted he didn't that he didn't know the answer, but thought somebody must know.  Since Twitter is awesome like this, Jared posed the question to his network and got some good responses from people he knew.  Then he posted the question and responses on his UIE blog in a simple sort of digest form, which I can now benefit from with my own research.

Thank you to Jared who thought to post these responses so that others may be able to enjoy!  I looked through a few of the suggested links and did find some resources closer to what I was initially hoping to find when I started on this web searching journey. 

More evidence that Twitter just rocks.

Just playing around with this ZabaSearch thing, kinda creepy and voyeuristic at the same time.  It's a sort of search engine that allows you to get the name and address of pretty much anybody (even past addresses).  Although, I've tried this same sort of thing with Ancestry and I'm able to get about the same results, this is just freely available online.  Searches like this only gather information from past and current public directories. 

I did do a search on my name, and surprisingly I found nothing.  At least I found nothing with my current name, everything for me is listed under my maiden name.  This is also true for Ancestry.  My husband isn't listed either, he's never had the phone in his name.  Our land line was in my maiden name when we got married because I was really just too lazy to change it.

Can there be a practical use for such a thing?  I see myself using this to remember old phone numbers and addresses.  For some odd reason, people asking me for an old address or phone number is common (mostly to verify old accounts or purchases.)  I went to Kroger the other day and forgot my Kroger card, apparently they allow you to use your phone number instead of your card at your checkout, of course I got that darn card at least 2 apartments ago, how the heck am I supposed to remember that phone number?  Now I can search for myself 2 apartments ago.  The same sort of thing happened when I sent my computer in for repair and it was under warranty (that was 1 apartment ago).  She had to scroll through my purchases on the register dating back at least 3 years to finally find my warranty info (I don't even want to know why this kind of search needed a phone number and why the scrolling was necessary but it did). 

Of course it seems creepy, but that information is already out there and it's easy to grab.  If it wasn't than this search engine wouldn't even be possible. 

I have been thinking a little bit about privacy these days.  I haven't come up with some concrete opinions yet but I have read a few good blog posts on it recently.  I hope to post a little more soon about it.

Technorati Tags: privacy, zabasearch, people search, addresses, phone numbers