When I first started work in my first company, I was assigned to redesign the entire web portal of the business presentation site. It was a bit of a challenge for me as I had no prior knowledge on using the tools given to me. I only learned about MySQL and PHP during my uni days, not Oracle. However, I had no choice but to get the job done.

Part of what I learned was on where to get free, open, copyleft images. Surely I wouldn’t want to land any party in any legal tangle. I found many, many useful image repositories during the 6 months on the project and it has widen my knowledge. Here are 9 of the most reliable sites to get re-usable, high quality, free images for your website, blog, adverts, banners, etc.

PicSearch



One of the most accurate and fresh image search on the web that indexes over 1,700,000,000 pictures! Picsearch connects its users to the vast visual resources of the internet by using its own technology to crawl the web and create a searchable index of images. When a user sends a query to Picsearch the returned result is received as a set of thumbnail images that are sorted to ensure that they are as highly relevant as possible. When the user clicks on a thumbnail they are linked to the original web site where that image is located.

Parents, relax, because Picsearch is family friendly so children are able to surf in safety as all offensive material is filtered out. The site is also very user friendly as it’s designed to be simple, fast and accurate. Good stuff!

Woophy



Woophy stands for World Of Photography. The website is founded by a Dutch collective of photo aficionados and internet designers who believed that navigation on internet can be more visual, logical and associative.

With the help of (amateur) photographers across the world their objective is to ultimately cover every inch of our world map with images that represent the world’s beauty and peculiarity from all different cultural perspectives. You can search by city, country, category keywords or member to find photos. The categories are animals, culture, landmarks & buildings, objects and people. You can also limit the search results by date and sort by number of views. Thumbs up!

Free Stock Photos



Download images and use it for personal or commercial design projects as many as you want for FREE! There are some restrictions in using photos from the site such as retaining the domain name when you use the photo for your website or blog.

YotoPhoto



Originally an experiment to facilitate easier image searching of the Wikipedia, Yotophoto eventually expanded to index over 250, 000 free images. Yotophoto is a search engine for free-to-use stock photographs and images. These are images that are either in the Public Domain or released under generous Creative Commons, GNU FDL or similar licenses. Yotophoto’s goal is to help people locate, remix, republish open and copyleft images.

Stock Xchng



Stock.XCHNG was launched in February 2001, as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. In about two years the site evolved into a massive community indexing over 1.000.000 registered users and more than 250.000 photos online!

The site encourages users to share photos with fellow designers! The aim is to keep SXC as a friendly community of photography addicts who generously offer their works to the public free of charge.

MSN Search Images



MSN, one of the top 5 search engines. The returned results are almost as good as Google’s or Yahoo’s. Just click the image to get its details like the source and the image availabilty. There is a written term saying that ‘MSN Search is not affiliated with the contents or authors of the page displayed below. We are not responsible for its content. The image may be subject to copyright laws.’ So check the image’s page to find out if it’s copyrighted or not before using it.

Yahoo! Images



It’s good! No doubt about it! However, images appearing in the results may or may not be copyrighted. What you can do is, if you find a picture that you want to use, review the site and contact the owners to find out about using it. Yahoo! Image also lists popular image searches by web surfers so you can check out the top search by everyone.

Google Images



Relax, and be happy for this is the mother of all image searches. You will MOST likely find the image you are looking for, here. There’s a lot that you can do besides keying in the keyword and press ’search’. You can also limit images to a specific size, a specific format or even colors! Once you find a picture, check the site or contact the site’s owner to find out about using it.

Again, the important thing to understand in using this search is that the images come from all over the Web and there’s no guarantee they’re free. What I usually do is just send a mail and offer a backlink as ‘appreciation’ for using the images. I have had 100% approval rate using this method as every website appreciates backlinks that boosts their search engine rankings. Everybody is happy that way. =)

Flickr



Flickr’s 2 main goals:

• To help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
• To enable new ways of organizing photos.

Flickr has tons of features, very easy to use and a community of world contributors. This is definitely the BEST and COOLEST online photo repository in the world. I could spend an hour doing nothing but checking out the ‘last 7 days‘ section. What’s even cooler? Flickr lets you search for only Creative Commons-licensed images in the advanced search tool to save users the trouble of having to sift through thousands of images to find the ones free for re-use. Brilliant work by the Flickr team!

Other Image Repositories
List of small to large directories

Spotplex.com is a web based blog article aggregator that provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. This is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe. Bloggers can track and analyze their blog traffic with a simple Spotplex code or widget. Not just how many people visit the blog, they can even find which articles people read most and how many people read them. Whenever an article of the blog is read, it will show up at Spotplex in real-time and get noticed by Spotplex users.

This is how it works.

1. A blogger inserts a Spotplex code into their blog.
2. Whenever an article in the blog is read, the code reports Spotplex server that the article is read.
3. The article shows up on Spotplex and the view counter reflects the change.

At the moment, they only allow people with invites to sign up. If you think your website is popular enough, register your email and they may give you an invite.

UPDATE : I’ve just received my invite in less than a week! Go get your invite and test it out!

Spotplex
Find most visited articles

Here’s a research done by Vizu Answers between November 20th and December 4th, 2006 about understanding blog readers’ usage patterns and selection processes. I took the time to read the entire report and made a summary of 5 things that we can learn from blog readers like you and I. They are :

Getting others to say you’re good is better than you saying you’re good



67.3% of readers state that they found the blogs they read regularly through links from other blogs. Link exchange is important. Find writers you admire and comment on their blog. Try building relationships. After all, the first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

Write highly valuable content and post consistently



It doesn’t matter if a blog is plain or full of multimedia flashes or colorful pictures. The blog author may be the most scorned man in the world who doesn’t have a sense of design, but if he writes REAL articles, the author will still attain growth in readership. If you choose to have it daily, then by all means stick to daily. Writing 3 extra articles today to cover for the next 3 days doesn’t count. Effort and consistency counts.

Have an opinion and write with style



I myself write about things that I found around the net, like the Blog Readership Report. However, I will usually add in points of my own. I will take the effort to make it exciting and beneficial to my readers while keeping to the facts. Some blog authors include profanity in their blogs to really show themselves, some remain professional and keep it clean. The most important thing is be yourself. Once there is acceptance in readers, there will be growth in readers.

Show some personality



Be funny. Be loud. Show some attitude. Again, stand out from the crowd by being yourself. If a blog is about birds, I’m pretty sure that the blog will draw a crowd from animal lovers and not home improvement enthusiasts. So stick to a category and stay there. Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time.

Write Daily



68.3% of readers will visit their favorites everyday. My personal preference would be to post 1 article everyday. When I started out blogging in November 2006, I posted articles irregularly. I only did it when I felt like it. It was not until February 2007 that I decided to hold it together and retain the shape of my blog. I began to write daily for the love of myself. Soon enough, readership increased. I feel happiest when I get comments. =)

Vizu Answers
See What The World Thinks

Blog Readership Report
Understanding blog readers’ usage patterns