Which free image provider is a gem among the rest?

Welcome to my senior year of blogging! 

I am very excited for this year and what is in store for me, but also those who are going to be reading my blog. Many new things will be learned, new opportunities provided and new paths to be taken in order to insure my success.

Today's blog topic is concerning free image source websites. Although most people just fall back on Google image search, there are copyright issues attached to most photos that don't actually come from a free image source website. Today we are looking at four different sites, one that I have used before and the other three that I have never been acquainted with before today.

The first site I went to is the one that I have used for years, MorgueFile. MorgueFile's navigation process has always been very easy, with a big search bar at the top and a grid style layout for presenting the photos below, so that wasn't an issue. When I was coming up with a topic to search for pictures I tried several on MorgueFile and they didn't come up, which was quite frustration causing me to go to a rather generic topic: Fashion. There were around 700 photos found when I searched "Fashion" but they were rather disappointing as they weren't necessarily related to fashion. For example, this was a photo that came up:

Now I don't know about you, but this doesn't seem to have literally anything to do with fashion which was quite frustrating.

Not all of the photos from MorgueFile were bad, and here are two decent photos that came up from the results.

            

         

Okay, now that we have revisited the old favorite, MorgueFile, it is now time to dive into the other three sources of free images. Pexels, being the next one, is rather similar in layout with a huge search bar and a grid layout presenting the images on the site. I was actually more impressed with the results I received from searching "Fashion" on Pexels, here are two of my results so that you can see. 

Both of these photos are obviously fashionable as well as high quality images. I could easily use these on a website about fashion without worrying if someone could guess that I got these from a free image source website. Unfortunately, the results from Pexels weren't all sun and rainbows and there were also some unrelated photos within the search results. I was also disappointed with the amount of photo results there was. There were so few it actually offered looking on a different free image source website, which coming from a web designer, you never want to steer users away from your site. Below are two of the unsatisfactory results that I received from Pexels.

                                                           

The first one of these photos looks like an Instagram photo that they stole from someone's account which is questionable, and the second photo isn't directly related to fashion which is also frustrating. BUT, on to the next one!

Our third free image source website that we are testing out today is one called Gratisography. The first thing I was presented by when using this site is the frustration in navigation. At first, I didn't even think the site had a search bar until I had scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the page to finally find a search bar. The only thing is, the search bar is actually connected to a different site. This bothered me, as I hate when I click on a link within a site and I am taken to a complete other site without being warned before hand. My second concern with this site was its lack of variety in the photos. Since I could not actually search the site for photos tagged with "fashion" I just went to the "people" tab and was surprised to find heavily manipulated photos, which is somewhat annoying because many people use free image sites in order to find images to manipulate, NOT ones that are already tampered with. Here is what I was talking about:

 I found honestly one decent photo related to fashion, the other one was alright but it was more about skateboarding than fashion, although I included anyways to continue my theme of two positive pictures and two negative. Here are the featured photos below.

 Now on to the final and fourth free image source website, Unsplash. This one was a bit different than the other three sites, and it definitly had both pros and cons. It's pros were the quality of the images, and the relation of the images. The con was the small amount of photos provided. I actually had some trouble finding "bad" images from this site, which is a good thing. But here are the four photos that I gathered from my search on Unsplash in ranking order of best to worst.

It is now time for the overall review of all four of these sites! 

First question, which site was easiest to navigate? 

Although MorgueFile and Pexels and Unsplash were all easy to navigate, I am going to say MorgueFile and Pexels are tied for first place because of their large search bar and grid layout.

Which site provided the most photos?

This is a much easier question as the clear winner is MorgueFile. Now if we got into which site had the most relevant photos, then it would probably be between MorgueFile and Unsplash. This is ironic actually because Unsplash actually had the least amount of search results.

Which site provided the best quality photos?

Although Unsplash had really good quality photos I am going to have to give this one to Pexels because even if not all the photos were related, all of the photos looked very very nice and would add some polish to any site. 

Which site made it easiest to download images?

All of these sites made downloading images actually really easy, but I am going to base this one off of which one required the least amount of clicks. So the award for downloadability is going to go to Gratisography because all you have to do is hover over an image to access the little down arrow which allows you to download the image directly.

Which site would I choose to use?

Oh boy, now for the overarching question, which site is overall the best? This is a tough one because honestly each site is good in their own way, it just depends on what you are searching for. But if I had to pick one besides the old favorite of MorgueFile (which I hate sometimes) I would pick Pexels. I like the layout, I like the quality of the photos and the variety is pretty nice. 

After going through this review process I would like to amplify one thing, and that is to just take your own photos whenever and however often as possible because you will get more of what you want from something you produced, and hey it definitely makes you look cooler. ;)