Veezzle offers a simple way to search for free photos

Veezzle is a newcomer on the image search arena, and it focuses mainly on photos that are okay to use commercially. I usually turn to Compfight for things like that, but Compfight sources all of its images only from Flickr; Veezzle seems to pull in images from all over the place.

Overall, the site feels a bit nascent. One remarkable thing is that they managed to pick a domain name that is almost impossible to type without a typo, very hard to remember clearly, and quite difficult to dictate over the phone. Even with all of that, it still manages to look Web 2.0-ish. That's quite a feat there. Was that Veezzle ... Veezl ... Veezle? You get the point, I think.

As per usual on these sites, accuracy was an issue. I guess nobody has quite figured out the whole "image search" thing yet. Searching for "happy monkey" gave me this nice "lump vodka bottle" right in the first page. While this may be one way to make a monkey happy, it's not exactly what I was looking for.

On the plus side, the site seems to credit creators very nicely. Photographer notes are preserved; you get to see what the photographer had to write about their work and any requests for credit. The site is also quite fast, and it's free of banners and pop-ups.

Tags: creative commons, CreativeCommons, free, photography, stock photos, StockPhotos