Do you get tired of searching through page after page of stock images, looking for that one perfect image to go with a blog post or design project? There are so many sites that sell stock images, and it can be tedious and time-consuming to look through them, not to mention the hassle of having to maintain accounts at each one. This is why I was so excited when I received a press release about a new site called BrightQube that has an innovative way to look through stock images from many sites at once, and purchase them without having an account or purchasing credits in advance.
After entering your search terms, and the choice of whether you want to search for “Everyday” images (the cheap kind) or “Professional” images (not so cheap), you’re presented with a mosaic of matches to your query, with the most relevant in the center:
You can zoom in and out on your mosaic, and drag the screen around to see more images. There are advanced search features that allow you to filter your results by orientation, price and resolution and sort by price and size. You can also build and save lightboxes.
My first love in stock images is iStockPhoto, but the interface on BrightQube is so awesome, and makes scanning for just the right image so quick and easy, that I will definitely be a regular customer.
(this is not a paid review or an affiliate thing, in case anyone was wondering…)
Thanks for the heads up on this service. It sounds like something that could save me plenty of time.
I like Stock Exchange as my personal choice. It’s got a lot of great pics on it and the best part is that they are free. Though I must admit iStockPhoto has some great photographic art also.
Jess
Cool, thanks, will definitely try it out.
@JLGraham – yes! Stock Exchange is awesome. I often go there first, depending on what I’m looking for. They don’t have illustrations I can open and modify in AI, but for photographs and basic illustrations that I’m not going to need to modify, they’re great.
I saw the BrightQube website through a web designer friend.
Very useful and user friendly
love brightcube. a web designer friend uses it and it saves loads of time
Very Thanks
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I’ve just been using sxc.hu for all of my stock needs when blogging, I’ll certainly appreciate this.
Is this the only service of it’s kind?
I really like iStockphoto. I am always so many nice pictures
This sounds like a really stylish and useful site, but is there a huge demand for pay-for images when you can use creative commons images from Wikipedia / Last.fm / Flickr?
Thanks for that, certainly a useful service and one I will be using.
What a great interface! Thanks for pointing it out
Wow, I’m going to have to use that soon! *starts up photoshop*
Thanks very much. The google image search is cool, but lacking some functions, amd style. I’d expect better from the king of internet search. I’m sure they’ll catch up soon
I just found one of the best photo in the world on that site!!!
Thanks for letting us know about it!
I’ll check this out. Can’t be as bad as some of the others I’ve tried.
Thanks for the tip! It will take a bit to get used to dragging the screen. I liked it though.
Thanks a lot for letting us know about this service.What I loved about Brightqube was the accuracy of search results, amazing!!
Haven’t seen that site before – looks really good and very easy to use. Have bookmarked the site so will use in the future. Thanks for the link
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I think this is a great interface and a really easy way to browse and choose photography – very innovative. I’m impressed!
Randa, iStockPhoto is my favourite too but for me it’s only because it’s got more photos than its competitors. By the way, I also go to Fotolia and Shutterstock – check them out.
The design of BrightQube is not new – I used PicLens for a long time now – it’s a plugin for Firefox for picture viewing. It’s very nice but gives me a slight headache sometimes because of the way it’s done
wow. This could give a good competition to istockphoto. I went to BrightQube now and did some searches. Only problem is for some images the price is little bit high when comparing with istock. Just my 2 cents, I did not do a full review of the prices yet. But this certainly looks awesome and I am sure I will be spending much time there. Thanks for the nice review. Thumbs up
Thanks for sharing this link!
3 Million Royalty Free stock photos, images and illustrations. (Im in love)
OK, question. How much trouble are you going to get into just going to Google images and dragging a picture to your desktop? I know it’s bad form, but it seems like copyright issues can’t keep up with the internet.
This is excellent- always looking for more photos to include in my own posts/website designs.
Thank for the heads-up on this one. I’ve been using dreamstime and istockphoto primarily for my stock photo needs. Istockphoto is my favorite of the two, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent literally hours looking for that “one” image that I need. A lot of times I don’t end up finding it and have to end the day discouraged.
I’m going to give BrightQube a shot.
istock has always been my first point of call for stock photography especially based on their pricing, although they have managed to creep up over the past few years.
Always good to find other sources to expand the image banks for my new site http://www.barefoot.com.au
This looks like a great site! I will bookmark it and check it out!
Very cool. I love the elegance of your designs. Thanks for inspiring those of us who are trying to do the same. :-/
Have a great day!
Thanks for this. I also do web and graphic design and this is a nice resource. Free is also rarely a bad thing…
Tina