Finding high-quality stock photos for your next project can not only be a time-consuming process but also an expensive one.
With digital restriction management, copyright, licenses, and trademarks, we live in an era where we are constantly reminded to be careful to not step on each other’s toes. Avoiding such issues can avoid both major headaches and ‘time-sinks’ when working on a project.
That is exactly where Zoommy App promises to deliver.
Zoommy is a small, yet very useful stock photo aggregator app, drawing together thousands of Public Domain photos from multiple sources. For ease of use the photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, meaning they in the public domain and free of any kind of restriction.
The app is available for Windows, Mac OS X and even Linux (I’m especially happy about this one) and costs of just $4 USD. That is a minimal price to pay for easy access to a vast pool of unrestricted visual goodness. You receive an application token key which you can use in your Zoommy installation.
The application also includes some extra Zoommy-exclusive photos not available via any other sites. Zoommy fetches CC0 photos from over 30 sources, including Unsplash, the Public Domain Archive and others.
Features:
Furthermore, the app also offers the ability to:
- Filter photos by color–10 colors available from warm to cool shades
- Search photos by layout format (Square, Landscape or Portrait) dimensions
- Selected photo can be favorited, downloaded, organized in collections or simply copied by the URL
- Photos can also be searched by tags
You can also visit the original source of the photo, if you ever need to do so.
The interface is simple and organized, offering a responsive experience when exploring the tons of photos Zoommy aggregates.
Having said that, your experience might be compromised to some extent if you have a slow-ish internet connection. As a lot of the stock photos on Zoommy are over 4K in resolution, that might be not surprising.
WordPress Plugin
Interestingly, Zoommy offers also a WordPress plugin which seamlessly integrates the Zoommy library into your WordPress installation.
It is not available yet on the official WordPress.org website, but you can download it from its GitHub repository, and manually add it to your self-hosted WordPress site.
Check out the ReadMe if you struggle with the plugin.
Zoomed in yet?
Although it is unlikely to completely replace your stock photo search routine, Zoommy could certainly help reduce your stock photo budget spend. It is also thoughtfully structured and delivers a very user-friendly experience.
Give it a try and let us know about your experience in the comments!
Elio QoshiElio is a open source designer and founder of Ura Design. He coordinates community initiatives at SitePoint as well. Further, as a board member at Open Labs Hackerspace, he promotes free software and open source locally and regionally. Elio founded the Open Design team at Mozilla and is a Creative Lead at Glucosio and Visual Designer at The Tor Project. He co-organizes OSCAL and gives talks as a Mozilla Tech Speaker at various conferences. When he doesn’t write for SitePoint, he scribbles his musings on his personal blog.
