Greetings,
FOTOPEDIA is a web site offering free pictures and images for downloading.
I’ve found another free photo site. Actually, I located it quite a while ago but have only now had time to take a look. It’s called FOTOPEDIA and it’s similar to sites like RGBStock or Flickr in that photographers upload their images and make them available, free of charge. As a result, FOTOPEDIA offerings tend to be relatively unique.
So is the user experience, but not in a good way. While the site itself looks great, browsing the collection or finding a photo is a challenge . The home page is actually a series of slides put together in a kind of “Slide Share” presentation – very appealing visually but not particularly practical. The only effective way to access the collection is through a keyword search. There is no way to browse categories – at least not that I could find.
The folks at FOTOPEDIA must really love the “Slide Share” look because that’s how search results are displayed as well. The computer screen is dominated by one picture while along the bottom is a row of thumbnails found during the search. The left and right arrows located near the bottom right of the screen provide a way to scroll through the thumbnails. Below that is the copyright information. All pictures are offered under the creative commons licence but there are variations for commercial/non-commercial use. For school’s, that should not matter.
When a desired picture is found, a right click will save it to the desktop.
Bottom line? I hate to, “look a gift horse in the mouth”, (to quote an old proverb) by saying anything negative about FOTOPEDIA. After all, it’s not like the web is overflowing with free picture sites and to be fair, this one is not that bad. Some folks may even like the “Slide Share” style user interface even if I don’t. The important thing is content and FOTOPEDIA has lots, all licensed under Creative Commons. The rest? Perhaps that’s an acquired taste.
The site is free to use and no account is needed for access.
You can take a look by going to
Thanks for visiting DE Tools.
John Goldsmith,
detools01@gmail.com
Cyberjohn07
