Everystockphoto.com is a search engine for freely licensed photos, and aims to become the leading community portal for stock photography. We are located in Vancouver, BC, and we launched in April 2006. Everystockphoto.com is owned and operated by Vibrant Software.
We index license-specific photos from a variety of sources. We make an effort to show as much information as we have about particular photos on the photo page, including source, license, dimensions, photographer, and other data. The license is almost always shown below and left of a photo, and clicks through to the specific license page. In addition to the millions of freely licensed photos that we index, we present royalty-free (low cost) photos in a separate column along side our search results, from our partner Fotolia.com.
You can view a photo's license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos. All the images listed on our site are license-specific. Most of them are free to use, under specific conditions. Before making use of these images, it is your responsibility to visit the sites that host these images, and review the licenses there. Be aware that there are special issues regarding photos of people (especially children!), landmarks and trademarks, please see the question below for more information.
We currently only index photos that are freely licensed, and therefore you cannot buy them. However, if you wish to buy the photos for special purposes or uses outside the license, we suggest contacting the photographer in question. At this time, we do not sell photos on everystockphoto.com, we do however list photos from our parter Fotolia.com, who has millions of Royalty-Free photos for sale.
Everystockphoto.com searches photos under a number of free licenses. We display the license icon to the below and left of images, and clicking this will take you to the license page. Licenses include a variety of Creative Commons, GNU, public domain, and custom free licenses. We also list royalty-free photos from our partner Fotolia. Photos for sale have a dollar sign as a license icon.
Creative Commons is a charitable corporation that has created a set of open source licenses, which content owners and artists can apply to their intellectual property. These licenses define the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright, "all rights reserved" and the public domain, no rights reserved. These licenses help artists to keep their copyright while inviting certain uses of their work, a "some rights reserved" copyright.
Believe it or not, many photographers are not motivated by money. They want to share their work with the world, under specific conditions, which almost always include being credited for their work. By selecting the free license with the restrictions they are comfortable with, photographers distribute their work while retaining specific rights.
This is a very important issue to understand. A photographer may freely license their work, but they cannot waive the rights of their subjects. Subjects must sign model released to waive their own rights, and children must have releases signed by their legal guardians. Unfortunately, most free photography does not come with these required model releases. This makes free photography of people unsuitable for commercial use, we strongly suggest contacting individual photographers before using photos of people, and especially children. The same issue applies to recognizable trademarks, and landmarks, both of which require specific permission not embodied in the free license.
Of course, we cannot give legal advice. However we can say that the more commercial the usage of media is, the larger the potential liability. If you are producing work for a million dollar advertising campaign, you absolutely need to have model releases for all of the subject. If you are at all in doubt, contact the photographer at the source site to find out more information.
Creative commons licenses are non-revocable. That means that while an artist may stop distributing their work under a creative commons license, any usage of the media that was already made is still covered under the original license forever. That said, at everystockphoto.com, we always operate in good faith, according to the wishes of the artist. Many people make use of creative commons licenses without understanding what they are doing. Others do so knowingly and later change their minds. If you have used work under creative commons licenses, you can continue to do so if licenses are changed, but we suggest contacting the photographer, and complying with their wishes. If you have licensed media using creative commons licenses, and want us to stop distributing them as such, we will comply with your wishes.
Membership is free and allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos. We are constantly adding new member features. For the best experience at everystockphoto.com, we suggest you create an account, and use the site while logged in!
If you wish to have your collection of creative commons, or otherwise freely licensed photos indexed, please contact us and we would be happy to add your site. One good method is to create an account at Flickr and provide us with your username, and what licenses you want us to index, and we can index your images for you. For site indexing, please note that we only have so much capacity, and it can take considerable time for your site to get to the top of the indexing list. We are working on increasing our indexing capacity!
At the moment, we index photos, but do not host them. This will be changing in the near future, so please keep checking back!
At the moment we do not sell photos on everystockphoto.com, although this may change in the future. Our partner Fotolia.com, however, does allow you to sell photos, and we recommend signing up for an account there to sell your photos.
If you have found your photos on this site, it means that you have published them under a free license at one of the sites we index. Commonly this question comes from Flickr users. At Flickr we index CC-BY images only, unless specifically asked to index other creative commons licenses by the photographer. Please note that we have no way of knowing when you change your license at Flickr or other sites (and as discussed here, these licenses are non-revocable). If you do change your license and wish to have your photos removed from everystockphoto.com, please contact us.
Our policy is to de-list photos on request of the photographer. Currently, the best way to get this done is to contact us via our contact form, with the site name, your username, and the reason for de-listing (for our information). We will comply as soon as possible - please be patient, we have a lot going on!
