
Splashbase: Find free, public domain, hi res photos - isaacmadan
http://www.splashbase.co/
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chrisrogers
I have long relied upon Flickr's advanced search[1] for this purpose. It
allows a Creative Commons license constraint for commercial usage or use as
source material. The advantage to their search is with the combined video
search and finer media segmenting.

[1]
[https://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/](https://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/)

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CSDude
It has very nice pictures to use, thanks for sharing, I was saving money to
buy stock photos to use in my product.

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huskyr
Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia's media database, has over 21 million images that
are free and usable for commercial purposes:

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)

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shakethemonkey
They are "free" but with significant strings attached. The key thing about
Splashbase is the images have almost zero strings attached. I say almost
because even public domain images will have caveats; for instance, one cannot
make it appear that someone is endorsing a product when they did no such
thing, etc.

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ZeroGravitas
Wikimedia Commons items should have their licence data attached, e.g.

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain)

Though I'm not sure how you can search just that subset.

Found it, add _+incategory: "Public Domain"_ to the search, as in this example
searching for "cats":

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASe...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&search=cats+%2Bincategory%3A%22Public+Domain%22&fulltext=Search)

Example result (interestingly tagged as both public domain and CC):

"Two cats, dressed as humans, holding rope, which doll appears to be skipping"

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Two_cats,_dressed_as...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Two_cats,_dressed_as_humans,_holding_rope,_which_doll_appears_to_be_skipping.jpg)

Though, from the dearth of results that may not be searching sub-categories.

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shakethemonkey
Right, it doesn't search sub-categories, so while not completely useless, it's
merely next to useless (no efficient way to search the corpus of public domain
images on Wikimedia Commons).

The main issue with pointing to Wikimedia is that it seems to funnel people
into Creative Commons licenses. Maybe that is not the intent, but that is what
happens. I like the idea of a prominent place that encourages the Public
Domain.

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x1798DE
Yeah, I recently had to make something commercial where I didn't think
attribution was going to be possible, and I knew that SA wasn't going to fly.
I figured I'd check out Wikimedia Commons but found it very hard to find truly
public domain images. Though there might have been usable pictures available,
I ended up just going out and taking one myself because the search wasn't
really practical.

I also think a lot of people of the current generation probably don't think
that much about licensing and copyright and don't realize how many strings
they're attaching to the use of their image when they upload it, when my guess
is that for most people, one of the CC licenses like CC-by-SA is essentially
the same as releasing it into the public domain (for them), but of course it
excludes it from inclusion into any non-CC works for likely over 100 years.

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camillomiller
I hold this article in my bookmarks as a starting point to search various
services like this one: [http://designrope.com/design/find-stock-photos-dont-
suck/](http://designrope.com/design/find-stock-photos-dont-suck/)

I love these sites, but unfortunately the amount of really useful photos you
can find in these sites is pretty low, unless you don't really have boundaries
on the subject. Even then, I find these pictures incredibly difficult to use
properly.

1) Even in the flat blur era, you can't illustrate everything with a cool and
inspiring picture of a mountain or the slightly unsettling picture of a dark
forest. Sometimes the clients needs them smiling construction workers with all
their safety gear in place. Good luck finding a picture like that on those
free stock websites. It's obvious that if you're doing client work you
shouldn't even think of not billable options, there's really no reason to
avoid Stocksy, Creative Market and other cool pay-per-picture services.

2)Although you may find the rare gem, these images are free because their
quality is not that high (technically speaking, composition is usually pretty
good). I increasingly find myself looking at headers of glorious full width
websites with a clear noise in the dark areas that completely ruins the
effect.

3) Originality is lost. We reached a tipping point where you can spot an
unsplash picture from miles away.

Conclusion: use them as placeholders in new projects, use them for templates
or themes you're selling, use them to illustrate your blog post about some
inspiring stuff. Avoid them for a personal project you care about, abhor them
for client work.

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dshankar
It seems like Splashbase only shows images from one source,
[http://unsplash.com](http://unsplash.com)

Yet, I think Splashbase has a far more useful & easy to navigate interface.

Could you add more sources?

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tombrossman
Unless more sources are added I think it is simpler to just browse the
Unsplash archive at
[http://unsplash.com/archive#_=_](http://unsplash.com/archive#_=_)

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istvanp
For those who prefer to get the images downloaded automatically to your Mac, I
made unsplash-rb:

[https://github.com/istvanp/unsplash-rb](https://github.com/istvanp/unsplash-
rb)

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teh_klev
Images sourced from:

[http://unsplash.com/](http://unsplash.com/)

Which was discussed a while back:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5794083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5794083)

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jscheel
I just have a script that downloads all of unsplash's images. Much easier to
glance through locally.

Also, a little shameless self promotion... I've been trying to give this image
away for a little while now:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/jscheel/13069799215/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/jscheel/13069799215/).
Feel free to use however you want.

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booruguru
I think you should have the view and download buttons overlay the images...and
only reveal them when a user hovers over an image (e.g. [http://theme-
fusion.com/themes/](http://theme-fusion.com/themes/)).

Currently, the buttons are bulky and awkward, especially when the screen is
re-sized for mobile devices.

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thisjepisje
But how are you going to hover over an image on a mobile device?

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booruguru
Well I guess the overlay would have to be activated by tapping the image.

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Jach
Clearly lacking content, but it's great to see these crop up and they
inevitably get a few images other places don't have. I'm a fan of
[http://www.morguefile.com/](http://www.morguefile.com/) myself.

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gkoberger
This is actually great. I was using Splash
([http://unsplash.com/](http://unsplash.com/)) a few days ago, and had to look
at every image to find what I was looking for since there was no tags.

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icedog
I run a website which uses a blurred photo as the background. I'd love an API
from splashbase that I could poll daily for rotating in new images on my
server.

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foxpc
Show mercy to your users!

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PavlovsCat
By allowing browsers to cache the image preferably: everybody gets a random
photo, which then sticks for a while, but if you want a new one, you can
always just force reload the page. But of course, it all stands and falls with
the selection of images.

I have no idea wether visitors get anything out of this, probably not, but I
use random color schemes on my personal site and it makes it _much_ more
enjoyable for me to work on it. Most people only ever see one page or two, but
I have seen thousands if not tens of thousands, and a bit of variety can go a
long way :)

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epaga
Awesome. For browsing, it'd be so great to have a list of tags that are
available... or am I overlooking something?

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paukiatwee
Any plan for aggregate other free hi res photos from more sites? Or there is
already alternative?

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dsplatonov
bookmarked, thanks.

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mrdarknezz1
Needs infinity scroll

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afriend4lyfe
this site just copied all of unsplash.com's images and added tags to them.

the original site unplash.com, has infinite scroll.

there are only a few images in total so I don't think splashbase is necessary.
It takes less than a minute of scrolling to get through the entire db of
images.

