Tommy Collison

I’d like to share with you a couple of invaluable tools that I use in the course of my writings.

1. Jazz Biscuit’s CC Search
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Jazz Biscuit is a site that searches Flickr’s (one the biggest image hosting websites out there) CC photos. CC stands for Creative Commons, and refers to photos that the author has allowed to be used elsewhere, sometimes with strings. The most common are that you have to link back to them (the original author, which Jazz Biscuit does automagically) and that you can’t sell the images.

It’s by far the easiest image website out there – working on what I call the simple ‘press button, receive stuff’ concept (based on this) – there’s no registration involved no nothing.

The only downside is that it only searches though posts people have tagged – which leads to two problems: firstly, people who are lazy and don’t tag their photos or add any CC license don’t get their pictures noticed. Secondly, people who abuse the tagging feature – either by applying tags of no relevance to their photo to gain views or by the more innocent simply uploading 80 photographs of the same event with the same tags screw up the search process.

2. SXC.hu – Stock Photography
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This is a stock imagery site, so the photos are all staged, but in some ways that’s good. It’s a bit of a fail though because you need to register. The process is relatively pain-free though, and the benefits once you do are quite nice. SXC differs also from Jazz Biscuit because all the images are much bigger – usually about 2 MBs; and a lot larger in size: 3000px photos are the norm over there.

Both are very good sites which I use regularly, and would highly recommend :)