Splashbase: Find free, public domain, hi res photos

http://www.splashbase.co/

by isaacmadan • 12 years ago

144 28 12 years ago

gkoberger• 12 years ago

This is actually great. I was using Splash (http://unsplash.com/) a few days ago, and had to look at every image to find what I was looking for since there was no tags.

dshankar• 12 years ago

It seems like Splashbase only shows images from one source, http://unsplash.com

Yet, I think Splashbase has a far more useful & easy to navigate interface.

Could you add more sources?

tombrossman• 12 years ago

Unless more sources are added I think it is simpler to just browse the Unsplash archive at http://unsplash.com/archive#_=_

paukiatwee• 12 years ago

Any plan for aggregate other free hi res photos from more sites? Or there is already alternative?

chrisrogers• 12 years ago

I have long relied upon Flickr's advanced search[1] for this purpose. It allows a Creative Commons license constraint for commercial usage or use as source material. The advantage to their search is with the combined video search and finer media segmenting.

[1] https://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/

CSDude• 12 years ago

It has very nice pictures to use, thanks for sharing, I was saving money to buy stock photos to use in my product.

epaga• 12 years ago

Awesome. For browsing, it'd be so great to have a list of tags that are available... or am I overlooking something?

icedog• 12 years ago

I run a website which uses a blurred photo as the background. I'd love an API from splashbase that I could poll daily for rotating in new images on my server.

foxpc• 12 years ago

Show mercy to your users!

pestaa• 12 years ago

Bing also shows different daily backgrounds.

PavlovsCat• 12 years ago

By allowing browsers to cache the image preferably: everybody gets a random photo, which then sticks for a while, but if you want a new one, you can always just force reload the page. But of course, it all stands and falls with the selection of images.

I have no idea wether visitors get anything out of this, probably not, but I use random color schemes on my personal site and it makes it much more enjoyable for me to work on it. Most people only ever see one page or two, but I have seen thousands if not tens of thousands, and a bit of variety can go a long way :)

nthj• 12 years ago

I'm a developer for Ticketbud, and we let our event organizers upload high-res background images on their event pages. If Splashbase had an API, I'd be keen to work it into our interface.

https://tbkmf.ticketbud.com/2014

dsplatonov• 12 years ago

bookmarked, thanks.

mrdarknezz1• 12 years ago

Needs infinity scroll

afriend4lyfe• 12 years ago

this site just copied all of unsplash.com's images and added tags to them.

the original site unplash.com, has infinite scroll.

there are only a few images in total so I don't think splashbase is necessary. It takes less than a minute of scrolling to get through the entire db of images.

huskyr• 12 years ago

Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia's media database, has over 21 million images that are free and usable for commercial purposes:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

shakethemonkey2• 12 years ago

They are "free" but with significant strings attached. The key thing about Splashbase is the images have almost zero strings attached. I say almost because even public domain images will have caveats; for instance, one cannot make it appear that someone is endorsing a product when they did no such thing, etc.

ZeroGravitas• 12 years ago

Wikimedia Commons items should have their licence data attached, e.g.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain

Though I'm not sure how you can search just that subset.

Found it, add +incategory:"Public Domain" to the search, as in this example searching for "cats":

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASe...

Example result (interestingly tagged as both public domain and CC):

"Two cats, dressed as humans, holding rope, which doll appears to be skipping"

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Two_cats,_dressed_as...

Though, from the dearth of results that may not be searching sub-categories.

camillomiller• 12 years ago

I hold this article in my bookmarks as a starting point to search various services like this one: http://designrope.com/design/find-stock-photos-dont-suck/

I love these sites, but unfortunately the amount of really useful photos you can find in these sites is pretty low, unless you don't really have boundaries on the subject. Even then, I find these pictures incredibly difficult to use properly.

1) Even in the flat blur era, you can't illustrate everything with a cool and inspiring picture of a mountain or the slightly unsettling picture of a dark forest. Sometimes the clients needs them smiling construction workers with all their safety gear in place. Good luck finding a picture like that on those free stock websites. It's obvious that if you're doing client work you shouldn't even think of not billable options, there's really no reason to avoid Stocksy, Creative Market and other cool pay-per-picture services.

2)Although you may find the rare gem, these images are free because their quality is not that high (technically speaking, composition is usually pretty good). I increasingly find myself looking at headers of glorious full width websites with a clear noise in the dark areas that completely ruins the effect.

3) Originality is lost. We reached a tipping point where you can spot an unsplash picture from miles away.

Conclusion: use them as placeholders in new projects, use them for templates or themes you're selling, use them to illustrate your blog post about some inspiring stuff. Avoid them for a personal project you care about, abhor them for client work.

Jach• 12 years ago

Clearly lacking content, but it's great to see these crop up and they inevitably get a few images other places don't have. I'm a fan of http://www.morguefile.com/ myself.

jscheel• 12 years ago

I just have a script that downloads all of unsplash's images. Much easier to glance through locally.

Also, a little shameless self promotion... I've been trying to give this image away for a little while now: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jscheel/13069799215/. Feel free to use however you want.

teh_klev• 12 years ago

Images sourced from:

http://unsplash.com/

Which was discussed a while back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5794083

booruguru2• 12 years ago

I think you should have the view and download buttons overlay the images...and only reveal them when a user hovers over an image (e.g. http://theme-fusion.com/themes/).

Currently, the buttons are bulky and awkward, especially when the screen is re-sized for mobile devices.

thisjepisje• 12 years ago

But how are you going to hover over an image on a mobile device?

booruguru2• 12 years ago

Well I guess the overlay would have to be activated by tapping the image.

istvanp• 12 years ago

For those who prefer to get the images downloaded automatically to your Mac, I made unsplash-rb:

https://github.com/istvanp/unsplash-rb

Splashbase: Find free, public domain, hi res photos

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