Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

May 22nd, 2007 Davis Posted in Site Of The Week, Technology, Search |

This week’s winner of the site of the week contest was Every Stock Photo. Every Stock Photo is a site that is especially helpful if you happen to be a blogger, because it allows you to search Flickr, StockXchange and other photo sharing sites, for images that are available under the creative commons license.

I love the creative commons license because it allows me to use other people’s photos by giving them attribution for the work. The photo I used above for example, was originally taken by Grant Mitchell on Flickr. Some artists would prefer to lock down their content, but if someone wants to use Mitchell’s photo’s, he doesn’t mind sharing his content with the rest of the community.

All of my own photos have also been licensed under creative commons. Some artists might worry that other people will use their photos for free, but my opinion has always been, that there isn’t much value to my photos anyway, if other people don’t have an opportunity to see them to begin with. If someone wanted to use one of my photos in a marketing campaign, I’d probably request some type of payment, but if someone wants to share one of my photos with a larger audience, I certainly wouldn’t want to stop them from presenting my work.

Flickr also has a creative commons filter that you can use to find photos, but by default, their search field includes a lot of all rights reserved photos and it’s frustrating when you find a great photo, but someone doesn’t feel comfortable letting you use it.

Another perk of using Every Stock Photo, instead of Flickr directly, is that you can search more than just one service, for photos that people are willing to share. Currently, the site indexes over a million creative common photos, from a number of different sites.

Every Stock Photo is a great resource, but there are a few ways that they could improve the site. I’d like to see them add more sources to their filter. Right now the service relies pretty heavily on Flickr, but looking through the search results, I didn’t see any hits from Photobucket, Zooomr or Webshots. Because Flickr already offers their own creative commons content search, by adding extra sites, it would significantly enhance the value proposition of using Every Stock Photo’s portal instead.

The site also doesn’t offer much in the way of sorting photos. One of the cool things that you can do on Zooomr is sort photos by how awesome they are. Zooomr and Flickr both use an algorithm to figure out which photos are good and which ones are junk, but Every Stock Photo doesn’t seem to take interestingness into account. This makes it harder to find the best photos on the site, unless someone has specifically tagged the photo for the term that you are looking for.

Overall though, the positives of the site, more than make up for the negatives. There are a lot of people out there willing to share their photos with the rest of the world, but sometimes finding people open to sharing, can be more difficult than it’s worth. Every Stock Photo, helps you get around this problem by making sure that every photo you see, has already been approved for people to use on their own sites.

Congratulation to Every Stock Photo for winning this week’s site of the week contest. The nominations for next week’s site are listed below, you can vote in the sidebar. If you know of any good sites that should be considered for nomination, feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to check them out.

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