Cool Tool: Pick free stock photos by color with morgueFile

Sources of free, high quality stock photos are always in demand.  Here’s one that lets you pick by color palette.

morgueFile is an image archive of free, high-resolution digital stock photography available for either corporate or public use.  The more than 200,000 photos are searchable by keyword, category, size, date, creative, rating or geo-tags.  You also can build or view portfolios and manipulate existing photos to create new images.  And there are online photography lessons and a community forum to help you do it.

But what caught my eye was the ability to search by color.

Find images to match any color
From the morgueFile home page, select the Color Picker tool.  The default search will show you all the images containing a particular shade of blue – #1e16f8, to be exact.

morgueFile / Zach Carter

To find photos containing another color, simply select Color from the filters to the left.  You can click in the color wheel or type in a specific hue.  In theory, anyway.  My attempt to find photos with matching #9bf816 – the color of my logo – resulted in 5 images, including the one I selected for this post.  However, I was unable to cajole the search engine into producing this same grouping again.  Clicking the color wheel produced results of a close enough green to satisfy me.

Variety of photos
There are many free stock photo sites, and some of them also let you pick photos by color.  One is openstockphotography.org.  Its archive is almost 10 times the size of morgueFile’s, and includes portraits of world leaders, art, and historic events.  But for the types of projects I’ve been working on lately, the candid style of many of the morgueFile photos is a better match.

No attribution requirements
Unlike some free photo archives, morgueFile images can be used without attribution, a boon to those seeking photos for commercial use.  For my blogging purposes, I’m happy to give credit.  Thank you, Zach Carter.

Where’d they get the name?
According to the morgueFile site:

A morgue file is a place to keep post production materials for use of reference, an inactive job file. The term “morgue file” is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats.

We’ll set aside the potential newspaper : morgue comparisons for now – bad taste.  I feel for you, friends.

Fun Extras
In morgueFile’s Extras section, you can download photos to use as wallpaper for your iPhone.  Beautiful images.  Now, if only I had an iPhone to download them onto.  Sigh.