Tama’s eLearning Blog

Despite the increasing number of Creative Commons licensed images out there, many students still seem to resort to a single service like Google’s Image Search since it’s still the easiest way to find images (copyright be damned). I’ve always hoped to find a tool which makes it just as easy to search for images which are freely reusable, via CC (or other) licenses, so I was delighted when I stumbled upon the Picture Sandbox.

The Picture Sandbox lets you search Flickr (and other services), easily restricting searches to any CC license type, as well as a number of other limiting parameters such as data taken, or user. As this screenshot shows, all of these options areon the frontpage as drop-down boxes, making the service very easy to use:

Simply entering ‘Venice’ (for example) into the search window, brings up pages and pages of photos which students could use in projects and media creations, with simple attribution, and then be able to re-use in the future as part of ePortfolios or the like:

This is a fabulously simple tool so I hope it finds its way into media classes across the entire educational spectrum!

Update: If the Sandbox Flickr search doesn’t work (which seems to happen occassionally) try FlickrCC.