BP3_photoXpress

I teach graphic design and traditional art at the high school level, mostly grades 10-12.  I ooften require stock images for use in examples or projects--or as source images for my traditional students to work from. My students often require access to images, as well.

While it is possible to find images out on the web via a Google image search or through some other general search engine, there are problems associated with this:

• The images are usually of low quality (72 dpi) and small size;
• It tends to be difficult to find a suitable image due to the vast amount of images out there and a non-uniform nomenclature system that often leads to strange search results;
• There are issues with rights to and attribution of images found at large on the internet; and
• You very often end up with non-appropriate images or on non-appropriate sites--or, if you have filtering software in place, you cannot necessarily access items you wish to access.

Specialized image databases are a way to alleviate some of those problems. One of the problems with such databases is that they are usually fairly expensive to access and download from--or the free content from them is watermarked or of lower quality.

PhotoXpress offers images of reasonable size and quality royalty free and with looser use requirements than many of the other sites I have seen. The site is also very simple to access and use. For a small fee ($9.99 per month) you can have access to their premium database. On other sites you can often pay more than $9.99 to download one image.

The search engine is very basic and simple, you merely type in the keyword or words that you are looking for. This provides you with the images that match your keyword search. Mousing over the images gets you a slightly larger version of the image to examine.

Search result page:

Clicking on an image takes you to the image page. This page supplies basic image information and a link to download the image. it also shows similar or related images, based upon the tags.

Image page:

Clicking the download link takes you to the download page:

The download page provides a list of the terms and conditions--although a user of this tool should read the terms and conditions provided in detail on the site to insure full understanding of use of the images.

PhotoXpress would be a good tool for other teachers such as myself and would also be a reasonable source of free or low cost stock images for school publications and web sites or for curriculum-related activities.