Gail On Tech

Find great free images in a snap

On this site, I tend to use screenshots to illustrate my posts, mostly for the fact that visitors will immediately know that they are on the correct site if they visit any of those reviewed.

However, as Gail on Tech is currently a labour of love rather than a money-maker, the issue of cost is certainly a major consideration for me.

When I need a generic shot, I do avail myself of the paid services of iStockphoto, and while it’s not expensive to source photos there, any money I don’t have to lay out is a good thing.

So, when I came across posts on the MakeUseOf and Lifehacker sites about a new site that can help source free images, I immediately got excited.

The site, Sprixi, searches Flickr and OpenClipart.org, as well as user-generated pics uploaded to the site, for public domain and  Creative Commons-licensed images.

I found the search phase of the process painfully slow, but the site has had quite a bit of publicity in the last few days, so maybe it’s servers were overloaded. And  hey, I can be patient if it isn’t going to cost me anything and the results are worth the wait — and they definitely were.

The site is dead easy to use. just enter your search keywords, choose your preferred picture from the results, then choose the pic size you want. You’ll also be asked to rate images you choose for their usefulness. This is to help refine the sorting process for future searches — you’ll see that the displayed results have some images that are  ‘unsorted’; the images preceding them having been verified by this rating system.

However, a word of caution: you should read the legals page before using an image. Sprixi takes no responsibility for the accuracy of licensing information, so you will need to check the original image source for verification. In most cases, you will need to credit the image to its owner.

If you’d like your own pics to get a bit more exposure, you should register with the site so you can upload them to be included in searches.

So whatever you need a good quality image for, whether it be a blog post, a school assignment, a work presentation, or a club newsletter, give Sprixi a try.

Sprixi