I can’t remember now where I first heard about the PicFindr site, maybe it was Sitepoint. Regardless though, this has already been a very useful site for me.
I’m doing more website work for some clients and am always in need of some good stock photos. This site takes all the guess work out of finding a great photo for free on the Internet.
PicFindr searches the web* for stock photography that is completely free to use commercially. Several licensing arrangements have recently emerged as alternatives to copyright (sometimes called “copyleft”) and PicFindr makes sense of them all by helping you find images based on what you have to do to use them, whether licensed under Creative Commons, GNU, a site-specific agreement, or someting else. PicFindr can even find free images you can use commercially without requiring permission or credit of any kind!
The site provides a very simple user-interface. Once your results show up the images are grouped by provider location and you can mouse over an image for a larger preview than the original thumbnail as well as the option to “Go get it”, save it to your favorites, or close the preview window. Not sure why they need the close option as the preview closes when you mouse out.
The image below is one that I grabbed, and aerial images are sometimes the hardest to find and most expensive to obtain when you do find one. The image below is resized from the original which was 1440 x 1080 resolution.