Most of you might be already familiar with the term "Stock Photography". But, if you are one of those, who have no idea regarding this term, then let me explain you briefly. Stock Photography, also known as Stock Photos, are professional photographs of common people, events, nature, landmark, etc. These photos can be bought and sold on a royalty-free basis. The royalty free images are not actually "free". You will need to pay a one-time fee to use the image multiple times.

Stock photos are used in newspapers, magazines, textbooks, T-shirts, consumer advertisements, trade advertisements, greeting cards, calendars, websites, etc. You might also need some stock photos in the near future, but finding a great stock photography site with a large amount of useful photos as well as reasonable pricing is a difficult job. After browsing a number of stock photography sites, I finally found a collection of great photos at Depositphotos.com.

Depositphotos was founded in 2009 and it is the fastest growing free stock images agency in the world. You can find more than 4 million stock photos and vector images at Depositphotos. The design of the site is quite simple and easy to use. I was looking for a couple of royalty-free photos related to nature. I did a simple search with the keyword "nature". And within few seconds, I was able to find thousands of amazing nature photos. You can see the live example here.

You can easily purchase the required images using credits. For every dollar, you will get one credit. The images are available in various sizes, resolutions and dimensions. You can purchase the XSmall image for just 0.50 credits, while the value of XXLarge photo goes up to 6 credits. You can also purchase the vector image for 9 credits. Depositphotos offers 4 different payment options – Credit Card (Visa, Master Card and Visa Electron), PayPal, MoneyBookers and WebMoney. It also offers an unique "Pay-by-SMS" option, where you can purchase credits just by sending a simple text to the given number.

You can not only purchase stock photos but also stock illustrations on an individual basis along with purchasing them with a subscription. As soon as you join this site, you will get a free 7 days subscription with an option to download up to five photos of any size per day. It means that you can get up to 35 photos, without spending any money. The only catch is that you will need to link your credit card or PayPal account. After 7 days, you will be automatically charged $59 for the monthly subscription. But, you can cancel the order within first 7 days and easily get the required photos for free.

If you are a photographer, then you call also sell some of your great photos to potential buyers via Depositphotos. There is no limit on uploading and selling your photos. But, you will need to go through Application process. The expert staff at Depositphotos will ask you to submit five images that represent your best work. You application will be reviewed and accepted, if the images are of good quality and composition. Once accepted, you can sell your images and earn money based on commission. You can earn a commission of anywhere between 40% to 60% of the selling cost of the image.

There are number of sites offering stock photos. But, some of the stock photo agency offer good quality photos at a very high cost, while the others offer low cost images, which are not even worth buying. Depositphotos is one of the best site where you can get high quality stock photos, without burning a hole in your pocket.

Depositphotos also have also launched some special programs for bloggers and photographers which can be viewed at http://depositphotos.com/for-bloggers.html or http://depositphotos.com/for-photographers.html.

Disclaimer: The following post is a sponsored review of Depositphotos. All views provided in this post are unbiased and have not been influenced by the sponsor.

Well, well, well, isn’t this awkward? Microsoft Bing Community has launched an app for Android users under Verizon that offers integrated search and mappingfor all the Android users that lack this super-special and super-rare service that Google’s phones seem to lack (at least for the folks at Bing, we are assuming).

It also has voice-search capabilities which are hard to find on the Google phones.

Evidently, they are trying their luck at this gapin the market. No puns intended.

A few days ago, Google tried to make a vague attempt at beautifying its Image Search and complicated things in the process. Image searches became more taxing on the browser. Google Image search loaded all the pages in a single view and needed us to scroll down to see results. This was good for those with fast internet connections. However, on slow connections, it simply did not load any further pages apart from the first or, in some cases; it did not load the thumbnails after the first few pages. To add to that, the thumbnail preview on hover was a user-interface disaster and made it extremely hard to use Google Image Search anymore.

Put simply, people hate the new Google Image Search and switched to other alternatives quickly. Today, while making a quick search, I found that the old image search is back for me. I have not used the  URL trick or the switch to basic view either. That can mean only one thing. Google is reverting to the old Image Search.

Google could clearly see how this change was scaring away users. This is quite a fast response from Google. Lately, many changes made by Google are falling far below standards and are not really adding to the usability. However, I am happy to have the good old Image Search back.

Despite the name of the site, MorgueFile has hundreds of free photos and they don’t have anything to do with death. According to the site:

Free images for your inspiration, reference and use in your creative work, be it commercial or not!

You are free:

Remix — to adapt the work.
Commercial — to use this work for commercial purposes.
Without Attribution — to use without attributing the original author.

This collection of photos was started in 1996 by Michael Connors, a multi-media artist in NYC. Michael, his brother Kevin, and a friend named Johannes have continued to manage the site since then. They accept photos and images from anyone who wants to contribute them. So if you have some unique photos or images you want to show off, just sign up to upload them.

The photos and images are indexed and tagged so that you can find what you are looking for. When you type in a keyword to search for specific types of images, you’ll get a nice looking page of thumbnails as shown here.

You’ll be to open any image by clicking on it. In addition, there’s also a tab showing Dreamstime images, but keep in mind that those images may not be free. If you are only interested in free images, don’t bother opening up the Dreamstime tab.

If you can’t find what you are looking for at MorgueFile, be sure to check out PicFindr,    stock photo search engines or the open clipart library.

I often spend too much time looking for the right image to use in a blog post or web page. My biggest problem is finding an image that I can use without worrying about copyrights. Most of the images you find on the web are not labeled with a clear message that says who it belongs to.

Since I’ve found OpenClipart.org, I think I’ll be saving a lot of time. Everything there is completely free. There are no strings attached. You can use their images in anything you publish.

OpenClipart.org has been doing this since they were founded in 2004. This is what they say about their project:

The usage of the name is to convey connection to Open Source software and culture. Also, the word conveys the concept of the project lowering barriers for participation for submission of artwork, development on the project, use of the site and use of the clip art stored.

If you just want to use the freebie art, you only need to go to the site and type in a search term or use the categories to find what you need.

They also offer several packages loaded with all of the clipart from the entire website. These can be downloaded in a couple of different formats.

Download Clipart

If you are an artist, they’d love to get your help with this project. Here’s how to get involved.

If you’re just an average graphics-challenged person like myself, be sure to tell everyone you know about this cool website.

I rely on Google Image Search to search for images which I can use in several projects. Until recently, I have been used to seeing text based ads in Google Image Search, however, while searching for an image today, I came across a new "Sponsored Image" result within the search items.

I am not sure about when this started, but a TechCrunch report dated back to 2008 had talked about this, however, there was little or no discussion about it in any other than that. Again, I have been extensively using Google Image search for a while now and haven’t come across this earlier.

Google Image search is a very popular service after regular Google search and there have been text ads earlier, but never image ads. So is Google finally implementing the Sponsored images into image search?

For those curious about where the sponsored image result appeared can click on this link. Have you seen such sponsored images in your image search results before? What terms did you search for to see this? Let me know through your comments.

Gazopa is an image search engine but with a difference. It lets you upload an image from your computer and then search the web for similar looking images. Previously we have covered Tineye, a reverse image search engine to find out similar images. Gazopa is a better alternative as it includes more options such as Twitter search, Flickr search etc.

To get started with Gazopa, visit the website and upload an image

You can search by using keywords or by image URLs in the URL tab. The best thing about Gazopa is that you can draw an image and let the search engine scan it’s archive and show you the results.

Once the upload is complete, Gazopa presents the results based on shape and color. I found them pretty accurate and the results matched with the shape and color of my image. Thus if you are looking for images of red chillies, here is what Gazopa has to offer

You can also search for similar images in Twitter using Gazopa. This includes images uploaded on Twitpic, TweetPhoto and so on. Direct image URLs are also supported in the search. Along with the regular image searches, you can also try your luck in finding some funny images using Gazopa from the Fun tab.

Browser Bookmarklet: Firefox fans can use the browser plugin which adds an entry in the right click context menu of Firefox. Gazopa offers a handy bookmarklet which can be used in other browsers like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer etc.

Gazopa Facebook App: You will also love using the Gazop Facebook Application. This app lets you create drawings which you can share with your Facebook friends.

Techie-Buzz Verdict

Gazopa searches images on “similarity” and not on “sameness”. Thus it is useful for those who want to search for similar images and not to find copies of the same image elsewhere on the web. The site supports searching images from Twitter and Flickr which opens up rich inventory for searching similar images on the web.

Techie-Buzz rating: 4/5 (very good).

Google Goggles, the latest innovative search has already created a buzz, with its unique way of searching the web based on photos. Google Goggles was recently demoed on Xperia X10, the much awaited Android based phone which will be released next month.

The user in the video was able to capture the barcode of a Toblerone chocolate pack and submit it to Google, to get accurate search results. He also took  a picture of the chocolate wrapper, and this time too, Google Goggles came up with accurate results.

Overall, the technology in itself is very superior, and it is definitely worth downloading if you are using a Android Phone. By the way, the Xperia X10 looks pretty good too and has a really awesome camera. Watch the video after the jump.

Images can speak a thousand words. This quote is so true. However, there is a condition to it, images can only speak a thousand words, if someone can see it. That though, is not the case with Google Image search robots, or for that and other image search engine robot.

Optimizing images for SEO involves adding proper metadata and giving the images proper names. So naming images as 1.jpg or 2.jpg will not earn you any points from these blind robots.

According to Matt Cutts, Google Image Search considers the metadata in images, as well as the URL of the image. However, like always he also advices against using black-hat SEO techniques and spamming the URL with too many keywords.

Watch a short video to see how Google considers the URL of an image to include it in organic image search results.

In addition to that also consider using altparameters in images. Search engines like Google consider the alt tag, to understand and get more information about an image.

Are you optimizing your images for search engines? Do let us know. Don’t forget to check the huge archive of webmaster tips to enhance and optimize your website.

There are millions of images spread across the internet, however not all of those are free to use, some images may require users to pay royalty before they can use them commercially.

Flickr does provide users with an option to search images with Creative Commons licenses which can be used anywhere without having to pay royalty to the image creator.

Google Image Search too will now have an option to search images and filter them based on the licensing.

The new options are now available as a part of the advanced options for image search, however we could not see them yet, which means that Google will be rolling out these features slowly to everyone.

This is the first instance any search engine has added such an option to image search, Yahoo does have it but it’s data comes from Flickr.

So the next time you want to search for a free to use image, head to Google Image search.

Update: Google has gone live with this feature you can read more about the announcement; Find Creative Common Images With Image Search.

[via Google OS]