Graphic Rating

Image Search Engine: EveryStockPhoto

• by Andy Gongea
• Jun 4, 2009
• 1 Comment »

For a long time I wanted to write this post. Not exactly this post, but something related to Image Search Engines. You know … those parts of the major search engines that are neglected. Apart from those images search engines, there are dedicated ones that have great features and a smaller budget behind.

The image search engine that I will cover in this article is EveryStockPhoto. Hopefully this will be better than the same old: LARGE, MEDIUM, SMALL options which seems to define an image search engine.

User Interface

This site is different from all the other regular image search engines. That is because being a dedicated image search engine, the developers and designers did their best in creating a great user interface. And from the visual point of view and also from the ease of use’s perspective, EveryStockPhoto represents a good product.

I really like the design and the overall look of this site. The logo looks good and the different elements of the interface are very well connected visually. Even form’s elements were customized so that the application would look homogeneous. Congratulations for all these things.

User Experience

Following the high standards set on the UI level, the user experience lives up to the visual interface. The screens are optimized and have all the information needed in this type of environment. You can search for a particular image, you can see the most popular tags or searches, and you can even see suggestions from Fotolia.

The search filter is quite simple to use and it has some pretty useful features. You can select the proportion: landscape, portrait and square. This thing is very important when you know that only a certain type of image will fit in your design. Sadly this feature is somehow missed by many stock websites and poorly implemented by others.

Since it is a search engine, EveryStockPhoto has the option to search only images with a particular licence type or from a specific site (this is a list with the sites where EveryStockPhoto has access), but it also has other features.

Performance

Being a relative small site, the application works but it doesn’t have awesome speed. That is somehow OK since it handles pictures and not text.

But, the user interface should be a little bit optimized because in this way the users would receive the feedback faster and the number of queries will increase. At this moment the front page “only” performs about 100 HTTP Requests which is a lot even for a image based site.

EveryStockPhoto Features

- Searching from multiple free sources
- Huge number of indexed pictures – 4,458,956
- Suggesting commercial alternatives
- Good filtering options
- Possibility to create collections and save them

Conclusion

Free images will always be an important topic to cover since there are many consumers. I really like this site and I think it is useful for many users. With a little performance improvements and some marketing, EveryStockPhoto will become the standard in free image searching.

User Interface
User Experience
Performance
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Graphic