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Brendon Wickham has a common problem. As a casual freelance web designer, he often needs specific images to complement a site - so he's been looking for ways of finding photographs. He wrote to Lighthouse on the Web looking for picture sources. He isn't alone; thousands of Web designers are on the same quest. No wonder. If you can't draw, photos are your best hope for adding graphics to a page. Photo-manipulation software packages from Adobe's Photoshop down to JASC's humble but competent PaintShop Pro provide an increasingly sophisticated range of effects. And some of the raw material can be had straight from the Web. Find a willing targetFindings photos for Web pages can be remarkably easy. The Lighthouse on the Web site, which contains back copies of this column, is decorated with several stunning pictures of (naturally) lighthouses. They came from a bloke called Bill Britten, the systems librarian at the University of Tennessee Libraries in his working hours, a brilliant photographer in his spare time, and a generous site administrator to boot. When I came across his Bill's Lighthouse Getaway site, I simply e-mailed him asking if I could use his pictures. (Using pictures without permission is usually illegal and always unfair.) Britten not only granted me the right to use the photos, but even put a few more shots up on the Web unedited for me to grab. I saved the shots through my browser; it's a mere right-click in Windows 95. I found Bill Britten's site simply by typing the word "lighthouse" into the Yahoo! search engine at www.yahoo.com. It may be that this is the most straightforward way to find the pictures you want on the Web: the Yahoo! team is presumably as easily seduced by good-looking sites as anyone else, so Yahoo-listed sites tend to use handsome pictures. But Yahoo! doesn't always come up with the goods; search for seagulls and you'll come across Chekhov plays, motels, computer companies and 1980s one-hit wonders The Flock of Seagulls rather than seeing bird photos. Other popular search engines suffer the same failings. AltaVista lets you find images by typing "image:" before your keyword, and HotBot even lets you specify whether you want JPEG or GIF format images, but their results can be even more erratic than Yahoo's. Neither engine found Bill Britten's lighthouse images. Specialist image search engines have sprung up to address this problem, but none provides a reliable service. Web Seer has been building up an excellent library; when I searched for seagulls, it brought up a dozen or so, some of them excellent. But it posted a "returning soon" notice up some weeks ago, and this month wouldn't even appear at all. Yahoo's own Image Surfer simply lacks a decent library of images: type in lighthouse and you'll get 65 responses in 11 pages, but most of them will be shots of porcelain model lighthouses. Image Surfer doesn't find Britten's lighthouse pictures either. Find a shopIf you try all these sites, you stand a good chance of turning up something. An alternative is to go to the shop. The CorelDraw 7 package, which can now be found for around $350, includes a mass of photos and other clipart on themes from food to industry; the same firm's WebMaster suite offers a slightly smaller photo selection for just under $300. And for those prices, you get the excellent Photo-Paint image-editing tool as well as a range of other software and fonts. Better still, you can pick up IMSI's MasterPhotos 50,000 collection for a bargain-basement $69.95. Like the contents of the bargain basement, it isn't all you might think: many of the 50,000 are in black and white, the numbers are bulked out by endless NASA shots, and most of the fonts bundled in the package are pretty horrible. Just to confuse matters, the catalogue only gives you black-and-white reproductions. But the sheer volume of photos means you can probably find something appropriate in a hurry. And the IMSI collection includes 400 photo "objects" without backgrounds, a form of presentation that allows you to play interesting visual games. If you've any interest in creating Web graphics, the IMSI package is money well spent. Find a WebsiteThe quickest answer of all, though, is to go to the Web with your credit card. Stock photo organisations have moved to the Web. Corel hawks a much wider variety of its wares on-line, boasting of "over 71,000 royalty-free images online", all of them searchable and browsable as dim "thumbnail" images. Corel comes up with all the lighthouses and seagulls anyone could need. It charges anywhere from $US5 to $US15 for Web-quality photos, depending on size, and you can pay by Mastercard, Visa or Amex Corel's biggest Web rival may be stock-shot giant Photodisc, which boasts its own 50,000 plus shots on-line. Its lighthouses come in grander, moodier shots than Corel's. They also cost more, $US20. But neither Corel's shots not PhotoDisc's really outrank the ones Bill Britten gave me for no more than a polite request. Tapping the generous spirit of the Internet community is still often your best graphic option.
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Bill's Lighthouse Getaway