Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/
With a big library of photos and thousands more being added each day, chances are high to get the right photo for you. Unsplash started as a simple tool for creators. The concept was born from the pain of the owners, had in finding great, usable imagery. Unsplash is now a platform fueled by a community, generously gifted hundreds of thousands of their own photos. In 2013, Unsplash launched as a Tumblr blog with 10 high-resolution photos that could be used for anything.

Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/
This stock photo site has over 1.6 million royalty free stock photos and videos shared by their generous community.

Pexels
https://www.pexels.com/
Pexels (not pixels) provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Pexels license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through the discover pages of pexels. Thy claimed; all photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by their users or sourced from free image websites.

Gratisography
https://gratisography.com/
Most stock image sites offer images page after page of sharply dressed business folks in pressed, boring suits with the same stock expressions on their blandly attractive and inoffensive faces. Gratisography takes a different approach. They pretty choosy when it comes to the images that they publish in their collection. They curate only the most interesting pictures, the ones with a personality, a perspective, a story to tell. For photographers; to become a Gratisography image, a picture must bring something unique to the table. It has to be perfectly composed, with proper light and exposure, sharp focus on the central subject.

Stockvault
https://www.stockvault.net/
As per Stockvault, their sole purpose is to collect and archive high-resolution photographs that photographers, designers, and students can share and use for their personal and non-commercial design projects. Currently, they offer over 128000 free stock photos with hundreds of new images added every week. Their revenue sharing program allows photographers to make money sharing their images by using Google AdSense and accepting donations from users via Paypal and Skrill. Site visitors can support photographers directly by clicking the ‘Coffee’ link below the download button on photo detail pages and donate via Paypal or Skrill.

Rawpixel
https://www.rawpixel.com/
Rawpixel is smashing stereotypes to create design resources that reflect today’s society as it really is. The free plan offers 100 images per month from their free collection. There is a casual and premium plan with unlimited downloads.

Pikwizard
https://pikwizard.com/
If you’re not careful, the copyright laws can end up costing you or your business thousands of dollars. You can use these free stock photo websites for your next projects.

Morguefile
https://morguefile.com
Morguefile is a free photo archive “for creatives, by creatives. The site was created to serve as a free image exchange for creative professionals and teachers to use in their work. A morgue file is a place to keep post production materials for use of reference, an inactive job file. This term was popular with newspapers to describe the file that held past issues flats.

Picjumbo
https://picjumbo.com/
As a web designer Viktor know every designer needs high-quality photos in full resolution. That’s why he created picjumbo. Almost all the pictures on picjumbo are the founders (Viktor’s) own photos which give him the huge advantage of being hundred percent sure that the photos are genuine and that there won’t be any hassle with copyrights and so on. Viktor is a hard worker and even today he does everything by himself, he studied and put all his effort into making picjumbo better. Here is the infograhic showing Picjumbo’s journey so far.

Reshot
https://www.reshot.com/
Reshot provides the world’s best-emerging photographers with a beautiful platform for sharing a sampling of their best work for free use in creative projects (as per theri mission).

Stocksnap
https://stocksnap.io/
Whether you’re building a business website, creating a print brochure, crafting a digital or magazine ad, or some other creative project, you know that a great image helps your content more eye-catching. For that, they offer these images under a single, simple CC0 license that lets you do what you want with all the photos, with no attribution required.

There are a number of premium photo stock sites offers some of their free photos to download like Canva. You can find a good number of websites like this using a simple search. Flickr offers tons of high-quality images, you can download photos whenever you want. But you can download other users’ photos as long as they give you permissions. Which site you are using for your stock photo needs?

You can explore recent photos from the ‘Explore’ menu. Just click an image, you can see the picture with Photographer’s description about the image. Look the right side of the page, you can see the Camera and lens used to take the picture. Camera Name with camera photo, aperture used, lens zoom, ISO, Flash details. Need more information, click “Show EXIF’, displays software used, exposure, metering mode, date and time, lens information, format used, etc. You can view the trending photos in ‘Trending’ from Explore menu. You can explore Flickr photos in 360° using Flickr VR app and Samsung Gear VR powered by Oculus. Just try Samsung Gear VR with Flickr and feel like you’ve been transported to another place. For that, snap your compatible Galaxy smartphone into the Samsung Gear VR, download the Flickr VR App, and tap the Flickr logo to energize. You can experience the VR photos without any equipment by clicking and dragging around a 360° photo with your mouse on the Flickr VR photo page. Visit Flickr VR page click a photo shown under the “Explore VR photos’, drag the mouse on the photo to experience the VR effect. In Flickr map (Flickr world map) you can search for photos taken in your neighborhood or a city or a state.

Flickr Camera Finder
(https://www.flickr.com/cameras)

You can find most popular camera brands and models that most photographers are using. You can find popular models on each brands and it’s popularity over time. You can see the camera brands and models used in the Flickr community, click the camera model that you want t o check, say Nikon D750, you can see the D750 usage over the year. You can check the  photos shot with that camera by selecting ‘Now showing’ (landscape, macro, action, portraits, etc.).

Upload photos from your Smart Phone
Did you know that you can upload photos directly from your camera phone into Flickr? There is an email address set up for you, just go to this page. Enter the email address into your phone and send! Make sure you have email on your phone plan or it won’t work. If you have a cameraphone AND a blog, you can post directly to your blog from your phone in one easy step. First, set up your blog, then go to the email setup page. Enter the 2nd email address into your phone too.
Flickr Phoos

Flickr members
When you click the ‘People’ in Flickr you can find the Flickr members and number of photos shared, connections and month of joining in Flickr. You can follow members by clicking ‘Follow’ button. On clicking the member name you will be welcomed to their Photostream. You can view the user’s album, Favorite photos (Faves), galleries and groups.

Flickr Groups
No doubt, Flickr is a place where photographers from all over the world come together and share their work to get admiration and suggestions from others. Here we can find different groups of like-minded photographers willing to provide feedback and comments.

Flickr Blog
(https://blog.flickr.net/en)
Look around, see whose stuff you like. Check out The Flickr Blog, which serves you great content daily, or keep an eye on the page showing everyone’s uploads. Or better yet, invite your family and friends to see your own photostream, so they can leave notes and comments and tags for you. there are several categories like, Flickr Friday, Photographer spotlight, the weekly Flickr etc. In the Photographer spotlight session you can learn and inspired from a big list of talented amateur and professional photographers. You can read how Eric Pare, a Montreal-based commercial photographer created ‘A Light Ninja With Two-Dollar Tubes‘. Some of the Flickr photographers are completely self-taught photographers. They learned about photography from Internet tutorials and interactive groups (through Flickr and other photo communities).

Flickr Code
(https://code.flickr.net)
To further that effort, today we are introducing similarity search on Flickr. If you hover over a photo on a search result page, you will reveal a “…” button that exposes a menu that gives you the option to search for photos similar to the photo you are currently viewing.

How To Organize your Photos and  Video
When you upload photos on Flickr, you can see a little box, enter tags there. Tags make it easy for you to find your photos later on when you’ve uploaded loads of things. There is also a space to enter tags on the right on each photo page and you can add tags when using Organizer. To enter tags, type some keywords relevant to the picture, with spaces in between, like “sky park dog blue grass green”. Don’t have any idea about tags, just visit this page to see most popular tags on Flick r- flickr.com/photos/tags/. Don’t want to share your photos publicly, don’t worry, here is a solution, when you upload your photos, check the box that says “Public” or “Private”. Private photos are completely hidden from everyone except you.  Now, if you want to be visible to your family or friends, simple,  just check those boxes. You can change the privacy of something at any time by clicking on the red (for private) or green (for public) button. You can also set up a private group and invite your friends and family to join it. If you invite them from the group’s page, they are automatically made a member. You can then add content to the group’s photo pool that every member of the group can see. To automatically upload photos to Flickr from your camera checkout Flickr tools. You can get Android and IOS app for back up all your photos and videos from your device in one place. You can access, organize and share your photos from anywhere with Flickr from your phone and tablet with these apps. For editing videos, you can use applications like, Movavi Photo Editor or PaintShop Pro .

Google Image Search (https://images.google.com/)

Google Images was first introduced in 2001, after that you can easily find the appropriate images that you are looking for with the help of keywords. Now a new search method evolved, known as ‘Reverse Image Search’,means image search with the help of images instead of the keywords. To performa a reverse image search in Google,

• Go to images.google.com
• Click the camera icon (you can type the URL for an image if it is available online-right-click an image on any website to select and copy image URL)
• Upload an image from your computer, or drag an image from another window (you can drag and drop an image into the search box If you’re on Chrome or Firefox 4+, you can also drag an image from your computer into the search box).

Bing Image Search (https://www.bing.com/images/)

The Bing search engine from Microsoft, also have a nice reverse image search. Look for the camera icon next to the search box at the top of www.bing.com/images. When you click it on the desktop, it asks for an image URL, or for you to upload a picture, just like Google does on the desktop.

Yandex Image Search (https://yandex.com/images/)

Yandex Image search use a Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) technique, also known as Query by Image Content, which considers image content as a criteria of image search rather than the metadata information which contains image details such as camera that has been used, use of flash etc. This CBIR technique considers several image aspects to perform image search such as texture, shape and colour.
You can search similar images in Yandex simply by clicking the ‘image search’, then upload an image or drag an image file or inserting the image URL address.

Tineye (https://tineye.com/)

You can use a picture as your search to find related images from around the web.Search using an image works best when the image is likely to show up in other places on the web. So you’ll get more results for famous landmarks than you will for personal images like your latest family photo.

Imageraider (https://www.imageraider.com/)

You can use imageraider for reverse image search using your phone or tablet.
You can search for images that are similar to ones you see somewhere.

Revimg (http://www.revimg.com/)

Reverse Image Search tools helps you to
find fake social media accounts. You can find Plagiarism, if you are a professional or amateur photographer. This tool could be of great help to you, use free reverse image search to find out your photos are using illegally for commercial reasons without properly attributing credits. You can also check smallseotools image search.

Mobile APPS

Google Goggles (Android APP)

You can search by taking a picture using this app. First point your mobile phone camera to a picture like, a painting, a famous landmark, a barcode or QR code, a product, or a popular image. If Goggles finds it in its database, it will provide you with useful information.

Veracity – Reverse Image Search (IOS APP)

Easily discover the truth behind the pixels with Veracity-as their advertisement. You can perform reverse image search on any image, otherwise known as “search by image”. It helps you to find out what the subject of a photo is. Discover where else on the web the same photo exists, even it if has been cropped or edited. You can easily root out profiles on social apps that use fake photos.

Conclusion

From the above discussion you may noticed that reverse Image Search tool helps you to find fake social media accounts, find image Plagiarism, to recognize people, products and places in a photo.

The Exchangeable image file format, popularly known as EXIF, is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras, smartphones, scanners and other systems and the EXIF data is embedded within the image file itself.. There are some ways to see the EXIF metadata. If you are using windows you can see the metadata by simply selecting an image, the associated metadata information will be displayed at the bottom pane of the windows explorer. You can also use online and offline EXIF metadata viewers like EXIF viewer, Google Picasa, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Flickr and other photo viewer programs. You can use the Faststone image viewer to see the metadata. You can remove metadata using the free FastStone image viewer, it has an option to remove EXIF/IPTC data from the photographs. IrfanView is also a nice photo viewer, you can also delete the EXIF with a little command-line. DropIt can be used to remove EXIF in batch.To remove the metadata using Irfanview from an individual image or multiple images click the “Save as” item or “Batch Conversion/Rename” item under the “File” menu. You can also use the free utility QuickFix to clean the metadata.

You can remove EXIF metadata using Adobe Bridge or Adobe Photoshop. There is a free tool available for it, JPEG & PNG Stripper to easily remove all EXIF data from your photos. This is a nice tool for stripping, cleaning, removing unnecessary metadata from JPG, JPEG, JFIF & PNG files. The image quality is not affected. It includes command line support. MetaStripper is a simple application to remove EXIF data. This is a free utility to remove meta information (EXIF, COM and IPTC tags) from JPEG image files. You can automatically process a large number of files with the click of a button. BatchPurifier LITE is a free edition of BatchPurifier that can remove metadata from JPEG picture files in batch. EXIF Eraser is a free lightweight software that allows you to easily and effectively delete entire EXIF/IPTC/XMP information from image files. You can also do it in windows explorer without any tools. To do this first, select all the images that you want to wipe metadata, right click and choose Properties. Select the details tab and click  “Remove Properties and Personal Information” link. This will give you an option to remove the metadata information that automatically gets stored in the images itself in the form of EXIF (Exchangeable Image File).

To edit and remove EXIF data, you can use GeoSetter, a freeware tool for Windows (XP or higher) for showing and changing geo data and other metadata (IPTC/XMP/EXIF) of image files. If you are a professional photographer who is working with tons of photos can consider the professional tool ExifCleaner. You can select images either individually, or you can load an entire folder, next decide what gets wiped and what doesn’t. Then click on “clean setup”. There you will be able to state that everything gets wiped or just selective EXIF details. This is a nice feature, as many professional photographers want to keep their camera models and exposure settings with the image. By the time this tool can delete the personal sensitive information like geographical location data, etc. But to get this power you must spend $19 for the software.

General Search Engines

First to talk about some all in one general search engines. We can search for web contents, news, images, etc. Google, Bing, and Yahoo are some of them. Blekko is a new search engine, but its image search engine is powered by Bing, which is already mentioned here. some of the dedicated image search engines like Imagery and Picsearch is also mentioned here. Another interesting image search engines are stock image search engines. If you are serious about images and want some high-quality images, these stock image search engines save your time.

Google Images
(https://reverse.photos/)

The default search engine of millions of browsers need not require any introduction. The Google’s image search engine is one of the most powerful images search engine, but most of the results are from different websites. Google noticed that people looking for images on Google often want to browse through many images, looking both at the images and their metadata, based on feedback from both users and webmasters, they redesigned Google Images to provide a better search experience. In the new redesigned layout image results displayed in an inline panel. You will be able to quickly flip through a set of images by using the keyboard. If you want to go back to browsing other search results, just scroll down and pick up right where you left off. Google Reverse Search, available at reverse.photos, lets you search by images instead of keywords. Upload a picture from your desktop, tablet or mobile phone, and Google will show all the other web pages on the Internet that have similar images.

Bing Images
(http://www.bing.com/images)

Bing images is also a decent image search engine. Blekko’s image search is also powered by Bing search.

Yahoo Image search
(http://images.search.yahoo.com/)

The Yahoo search engine also has a nice image search option.

Ask Image search

(Ask image search site)

Ask search engine also has an image searching feature.

Yippy Image search
(http://images.yippy.com/)

Yippy is a new search engine from the old Clusty search engine. Yippy also has a nice image search engine.

Image Search Engines

Imagery
(http://elzr.com/imagery/)

Imagery is a better image search engine. You may love this search engines as it can select preference of image files like JPG, GIF or PNG, sort by size, sort by black and white, grayscale or color, etc..

Exalead
(http://www.exalead.com/search/image/)

Exalead is also a good image search engine.

Reverse Image Search
(https://www.prepostseo.com/)

Search by images is a feature by using you can check similar pictures and photos from the internet. You can directly paste online image URL to this ystem or you can upload pictures. You can upload .jpg, .JPEG, .PNG and.GIF extensions. At this time you can only search one image per query but they are working on multiple checking systems.

Picsearch
(http://www.picsearch.com/)

Picsearch is a nice image search engine that you want to try.

Incogna
(http://www.incogna.com)

This is also an average image search engine.

We are also found some other image search engines like Cyclo.ps, pixsy, spffy, etc. But all of them are down at the time of writing this post, we are expecting that it will be available online soon.

Search Stock Photos

PicFindr
(http://www.picfindr.com/)

PicFindr is stock photo search engine. It searches the web for stock photos that are completely free to use commercially. It is a web app that helps you search several stock image, public domain, and photo community sites simultaneously.

Everystockphoto
(http://www.everystockphoto.com/)

This is also a stock photo search engine for free photos. The results come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo’s license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos. Membership is also available for free and allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos.

Photo Sharing Community

Flickr
(http://www.flickr.com/)

Flickr is the internets most popular photo sharing community. You can find tons of user shared photos on Flickr. Here is an example of a sample Flickr search, check flowers in Flickr.

Webshots
(http://www.webshots.com/)

Webshots is a photo and video sharing site. Free and premium memberships.

Photobucket
(http://photobucket.com/)

Photobucket offers image hosting, free photo sharing, and video sharing. You can find uploaded photos.

Getty Image search
(http://www.gettyimages.com/)

You can find high-resolution royalty-free images, editorial stock photos, vector art, video clips and stock music licensing at the richest image search photo library online.

Corbis Images
(http://www.corbisimages.com/)

Corbis Images provides commercial and editorial photography and illustrations.

You can find free stock photos from Clipart.com, FreeFoto, and Stock.xchng. What do you think about this list? Can you share some image search engines details?