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Public Work: a search engine for public domain images
- djha-skin 2y agoRelated: CanWeImage[1]. 1: https://canweimage.com/ https://canweimage.com/
- azeemba 2y agoNASA images was the first thing I thought of when I thought of public domain images. Looks like public.work doesn't include NASA images but this website does.
- amin 2y agoIt looks neat. I love the blurry background on the interface elements. Does it include images from Wikimedia Commons? I searched for a known Wikipedia photo I had upl myself (“urinal”) but it didn’t show up on your search engine.
- boomboomsubban 2y agoAren't Wikimedia images under the CC, not public domain?
- Timwi 2y agoNo, the uploader of each image can decide on any free license they want, and some people choose public domain.
- darweenist 2y agoThe mural of search results is cool but I keep getting lost and can’t find my way back to the earlier results
- apantel 2y agoThe infinite scrolling of the same images over and over again makes it harder to use. You can’t tell how many results you’ve actually received and what they are.
- acdha 2y agoI really don’t like how the source information isn’t available. Someone at a library or archive put effort into preserving and scanning things but that’s all omitted, and if you want any other metadata you’ll likely need to do a reverse image search. This also makes me wonder how reliable the public domain labeling actually is. Infinite scrolling looks cool but also means you can’t easily get back to any given result.
- fourteenfour 2y agoYeah, it seems like a promotion for Cosmos. I saw some planet drawings by Andreas Cellarius from 1660 on the default page that included "(not openly licensed)" in the info text. Even if they are public domain it looks like a quick scrape.
- MH15 2y agoThere was a similar implementation of this idea a year back, but it was open source/indie. Anyone know what it was?
- dhruvkb 2y agoI looked up the information such as the name of the work or the artist on Openverse and was able to find the image, as well as more information about the licensing. For example, I found many of Charles Lemaire's botanical drawings [1] on Openverse [2], where I could get CC-BY licensed versions from Flickr, and links to their CC0 version from Rawpixel. Disclosure: I am a maintainer for Openverse. I agree that is very hard to go back to a result, and also impossible to share a link to a specific result because the URL does not update. But as long as you are in a continuous session, the works you visit are added to a dock in the bottom-centre area of the page where you can go back to a result you've previously seen. [1]: https://public.work/cacti%20iconography https://public.work/cacti%20iconography [2]: https://openverse.org/search?q=Charles+Lemaire https://openverse.org/search?q=Charles+Lemaire
- acdha 2y agoYeah, in some cases it’s not too hard to look things up but the metadata is inconsistent (I just saw a date 1700-2006) and since they disable text selection on the info view it feels like they’re trying to discourage that. Basically, I want what you have on Openverse when I tap the information icon.
- nick238 2y agoGoogle Image search has an option under Tools (seems like you need to search first to get it to show up), then you can pick one of unfiltered, "Creative Commons licenses", or "Commercial & other licenses".
- jamilton 2y agoWhile that's useful, CC images and public domain image search results are pretty meaningfully different.
- Zambyte 2y agoI just tested Kagi and DuckDuckGo, both can also filter image results on license type.
- HKH2 2y agoWhich one of those is 'public domain'?
- sadeshmukh 2y agoOne is a license for all commercial use. Creative Commons is more restrictive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license.
- HKH2 2y agoIt's not clear what 'commercial use' means.
- mediumsmart 2y agoPublic domain gets assigned automatically when some time has passed or by the author releasing it into the public domain under the cc zero license. Unsplash started like that. There are potential issues like uncertainty about signed model release documents when people are the main part of the picture plus trademarks prominently appearing. it’s complicated Just realized I did not really answer the question.
- 2y ago
- matthewmorgan 2y agowhy won't it let me zoom in more?
- iamatoool 2y agoOr download on mobile
- can16358p 2y agoYou can?
- atomicUpdate 2y agoAre you asking or telling?
- Flatcircle 2y agoA simple thing people want, but apparently it’s harder than you think to get working
- rsingel 2y agoThe hard thing with this kind of search engine is that if it gets it wrong, the user is the one who takes on the liability. I would pay a license fee and so would a lot of smaller sites if you had insurance and indemnification if they got sued. However much I dislike Unsplash, and that's quite a bit, I do think there's a interesting benefit to their paid offer where if you use an unsplash image and it turns out that actually copyrighted (e.g. someone who is not the photographer who uploads the image and then the photographer sues you for using the image), Getty will defend you / pay your legal fees. Right now I'm very particular about using things labeled out of copyright or uncopyrighted. Even things that are in the Flickr Commons or on NASA's site can be suspect. For instance I just ran across a company logo uploaded by the San Diego aviation museum that's listed as out of copyright in Flickr Commons, but I strongly suspect it's still copyrighted. On NASA's site, I've seen images attributed to SpaceX and don't trust them at all not to sue. Given that the penalty for being wrong on copyright can be insanely high even if you have the best intentions, I would really like a source that I could trust and would pay to be indemnified.
- nox101 2y agoI ran into this recently. I was looking for a image of clown fish on Flickr with their license based search. I found a great one. I downloaded it and then started making the attribution where on I clicked through to the link of the photographer, or rather the their flickr account. It was immediately super clear it was a fake account with a few 1000 stolen images since there was just too much work and too much diversity in the images. I reverse searched for a few and found some of them on flickr and posted much further in the past and they were "all rights reserved"
- AlienRobot 2y agoFlickr is one of the better websites for this. I've seen a few websites with CC work where uploaders barely had any profile information. A simple "I take all the photos I upload and I know what CC means" would suffice. Ironically, the one that felt the "safest" was someone who linked to their Instagram where they posted photos. Instagram doesn't provide CC info, so this person went through the effort of creating an account in a different website just to reupload their photos that are CC. I was making some photo editing tutorials and I ran into a similar problem. I needed a photo of a person. Turns out photos of people have their own additional set of legal problems (right to one's own image). This made me very worried because surely all these photographers who are marking their photos as CC have the consent of the models, right? Otherwise nobody would be able to use the CC photos. What would be the point of a photo being CC if it was illegal to copy it anyway? I think some website had a license that said I couldn't portray the person in the photo in bad light, or something of sort, which was particularly problematic for me since I was looking for a photo of someone sufficiently ugly to make a tutorial about skin retouching.
- junglistguy 2y ago[dead]
- junglistguy 2y ago[dead]
- dhruvkb 2y agoRelated: Openverse[1] is an open-source search engine for openly-licensed media. It indexes CC-licensed and public domain images (including CC0) with filters for license types. Disclosure: I am a maintainer for Openverse. [1]: https://openverse.org https://openverse.org
- dailykoder 2y agoThank you for maintaining it. I haven't used it very often, but sometimes was a blessing when I was just searching for some dummy image for a presentation or whatever (like some PCB, code or whatever). Really like it! The search engine from OP seems a little bit off. I tried some technical search terms and it didn't really produce anything. Maybe that's just not what it's for.
- james-bcn 2y agothat is great! Love it.
- dantondwa 2y agoThank you for your work. While looking for references of past artifacts, this website has been so valuable.
- dbspin 2y agoLooks amazing, is there anything similar available for video? The official creative commons search tool (https://search.creativecommons.org/ https://search.creativecommons.org/) is pretty poor.
- sarayourfriend 2y agoFellow Openverse maintainer here. We'd like to implement video search eventually (and 3D models, text, everything!), but for the time being we're prioritising improving image and audio search. You can read about the project's near-term prioritisation on our Make WordPress blog: https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/tag/openverse-priorities/ https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/tag/openverse-prioritie....
- 2y ago
- wulu 2y agoCool, it's pretty fast.
- goestoo 2y agoIt does have really dumb UI, the image results are looks like part of the page background, and then there's the two direction infinite scroll!
- lioeters 2y agoEvery image is downloaded as a file named "downloaded_image.jpeg". Would be better if the files were named as the title of the work.
- rahul6401 2y agoNice
- nelblu 2y agoInfinite scrolling makes it extremely annoying to use. Also very limited search results. I searched for "London" and got nothing modern enough to use, or nothing that even resembles London remotely. Are there really no images of London in the public domain or just that they aren't either being tagged and hence not indexed or maybe both?
- farleykr 2y agoThis has potential to be an amazing resource. Not sold on the infinite scroll that goes in any direction as a useful interface for browsing the images. As other commenters have noted, metadata such as source information would also be useful and should be included
- jszymborski 2y agoInteresting! I often use public-domain etchings or wood carvings in my presentation and find them by searching "angry man site:gutenberg.org" or "angry man site:oldbookillustrations.com" in Brave Search. It works pretty reliably, but I've been meaning to make a semantic search, because I often have to mess around with the keywords to get results for some more abstract ideas. Feedback for this site: - FYI when a search result returns few results, the images repeat in the infini-scroll. This makes it marginally more difficult to evaluate each image, especially not knowing the exact number of hits w/o counting the number of images that haven't repeated. - I may be wrong but it feels like there are a lot fewer images here than there can be. - As other have pointed out, while attribution isn't leagally required for PD images, it's extremely important for many potential users as it allows them to validate the license claim you are making.
- Xen9 2y agoEngineering: Enable zooming. At certain threshold, the highest available resolution shoukd be downloaded & displayed, while further away you can even use pre-gen thumbnails. This would enchance usability.
- goodmachine 2y agoHmmm... this is trash. All images are called 'downloaded_image.jpeg' which is hilarious. Who created the image? When? Where? How can I find more from the same book, or by the same artist? Cultural amnesia is one thing, but annihilating the credits and context deliberately is very bad indeed. Pinterest does this evil trick, and Cosmos bills itself as 'Pinterest for creatives' = pure internet cancer.