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Head to head: Stock.Xchng vs. morgueFile, what's the best free photo site?
When writing posts, creating websites, or designing other promotional material, there's often a need for some stock images. You know, sometimes you need a shot of an old lady holding a parasol or something like that.
There are plenty of websites offering commercial stock photos. However, there are also two major players in the "free stock photo" market, which is what I want to cover here. One site is my usual source -- Stock.Xchng -- which I will refer to as SXC. The other one is a large, established site that is new to me: morgueFile.
After the fold, I'll compare them on several categories.
Selection
SXC currently has 392,039 photos available.
morgueFile does not offer a simple count, but its archive page lists the number of images in each category. Tallying these up, we come to 225,853 images -- about 167,000 images less than SXC.
Winner: SXC has a greater selection, hands down.
Search
morgueFile starts you off with a simple keyword search. Once you perform a search, though, you get an incredibly detailed filter pane on the left side of the site.
You can filter images by keyword, category, size, date, rating, color, geotag, or "creative" (I assume this is a CC-license provision, but I'm not sure).
Each filter has its own interface. For example, the "Date" filter has a neat slider that lets you zoom in on a period of time. You can search any period from Jan 31, 2003 to the present.
SXC features a simple keyword search, and ... that's it. The keyword search is SXC's only option. You can sort the results by date, size, login (photographer's username - I have no idea why that is useful), downloads, comments, and title. You can also choose the number of images displayed (from 20 to 60) at any one time.
Winner: morgueFile definitely takes the lead on this one. SXC doesn't even come close in terms of flexibility and filtering.
Browsing
Sometimes you don't have an exact keyword in mind, but you just want to browse around and get some ideas.
SXC has a "Browse" page that shows "random popular photos" by default. You can click "View Popular" and get the 500 most downloaded images on the site. There's also a list of subjects, alphabetically sorted from "Abstract" to "World," with subcategories in each. When you hover over an image you get a nice zoomed-in view of it. The same is also true for search results.
morgueFile also lets you browse by category, using its filter interface. There are fewer categories, and the interface is much slower. I couldn't figure out how to add a whole category (i.e. all of "art" and not just "abstract art"). In fact, I couldn't really get the category interface to work at all. I was unable to view two categories at the same time. Maybe I'm challenged, but it just didn't work for me. Also, the "hover tooltip" presents a smaller image file as compared to SXC.
Winner: SXC. The interface is simpler to navigate, and is far snappier.
Look and Feel
That's a bit of a subjective metric; I don't claim objectivity here.
SXC Is very white and small; the fonts used are small (it feels like 8-point fonts over many parts of the site), and the look, in general, is very minimalistic. There are tiny touches of JavaScript, like the auto-expand on the list of categories. However, nothing about it is fancy.
morgueFile takes a far bolder stand; the logo is freaking huge, and it really shows in the "VS" image that I created for this post. Look at how much more visible the morgueFile site is. Also, there are slick touches of JavaScript all over the site; stuff slides around, and the filter interface is quite slick (apart from the category problem).
Winner: morgueFile wins in the "looks" department, at least for me.
Speed
I tested this in a very "scientific" way. I went to the search results page of each of the sites and clicked a random result.
morgueFile took around 8-10 seconds to display the image page on my computer.
SXC took around 4 seconds.
Note that I mean the image page, not the actual image. Of course, displaying the full-size image would take a different amount of time due to differences in file size. This is the image page on each site, or the page from which you can download the full-size image.
Winner: SXC, at least for me.
Bottom line
SXC wins in selection, browsing, and speed, while morgueFile wins in search and overall look and feel.
The overall winner is SXC.
Do you feel differently? Maybe you've got another free stock photo site which you think is better? Let me know in the comments, but don't forget to mention why!
Comments
10
Subscribe to commentsJennMay 11th 2010 1:20PM
Some of the points above seem mostly opinion based. Shouldn't images be based on quality and availability over quantity and speed of the site to get the images? I find sometimes (depending on the category) the images on each site differ. Just my option but speed on the free photo site itself does not matter to me, only that they have the proper image size and quality that it will look pretty good but the image will load fast on *MY* site. but to each their own.
LewisMay 26th 2010 8:44AM
> Some of the points above seem mostly opinion based
Well, fancy that. Someone offering their opinion, on a blog of all places. This must be stopped at all costs!
> Shouldn't images be based on quality
Yes, image quality, I'd definitely like to know their opinions on w...oh, crap.
JennMay 12th 2010 9:31AM
@Lewis: i did not mean do not give an option, I was (unsuccessfully) trying to mention that it would be nice to see concrete facts or head to head in different way. I will try to explain more in the future.
BillyMay 11th 2010 3:48PM
Having used both sites, I don't really see the point of trying to rank one over the other. Stock photos depend so much on what you're using them for that having the selection of two sites to browse should be a bonus.
Anyway, I find that SXC tends to have more "professional" photos (white backgrounds, etc.), while morgueFile tends to have more "realistic" (natural settings, etc.) photos. I'll pick which site to search first depending on my project, but I usually end up looking through both of them.
Dave ProsserMay 11th 2010 6:49PM
Never know about MorgueFile, but ever since SCX got bought out by iStock, the range and quality of pictures has been diminishing on a daily basis. As a grpahic designer, me and my colleagues now find SXC pretty much unusable for anything. We give it a cursory glance, but all the decent, and more importantly, relevant images are on iStock. So thanks for the memories SXC, but why pretend anymore?
JoshMay 11th 2010 9:30PM
Been using sxc.hu for as long as I can remember. Would never dream of using anything else when I need stock photos.
budgetstockphotoMay 11th 2010 10:52PM
From a personal point of view I tend to find myself using sxc first, but from a stylistic point the images (IF they cover the subjects you need, and thats a big if!) on morguefile are much more stylish than the 'stocky' stuff on scx.
mostly I'm glad that there are two sites catering to opposite ends of the design spectrum.
I agree with Erez that Search and convenience Browsing are useful measures to compare here, both these sites are composed of user contributed content and the image quality is a difficult thing to compare, a lot of these are images that photographers had rejected at a microstock agencys, it seems more likely that the ones on morguefile are just uploaded by photographers who know that those grungy or creative images stand little chance of making it past image inspectors at microstock agencies (?)
Reg CheramyMay 12th 2010 1:24AM
My favorite is http://www.photoxpress.com/ lots of free images with only a limit to the number you can download per day.
James PakeleMay 21st 2010 12:41PM
Just a note on the "search" category. SCX allows you to search by more than one keyword, whereas mourgeFile will turn up nothing if you try to search on more than one term. For instance try searching each site for "computer server".
MarleyJul 20th 2010 3:36AM
I like sxc but i also like www.photl.com. they have many good images on white background, etc... And you can download parts of images as well as whole images.