By Staff Writer – John Federico (@gadgetboy)

Like most people, my budget for stock images is pretty small. Unlike Kris, I don’t shoot my own stock photos, either. I just can’t be bothered to carry an SLR along with all my other gear.

So, I search the internets for Creative Commons-licensed photos, but with only moderate success. Flickr’s search tools provide the ability to limit your search to CC-licensed photos, but the results aren’t always great as you’re limited to user-tagging.

Google Image Search works pretty well but it doesn’t enable the ability to limit your search to CC-licensed images. Many times I’ll find the “perfect” image only to discover that it has a commercial license or worse, no license information at all.

Here comes sprixi to make your day (and mine) a lot easier.

Sprixi provides a simple, elegant search interface for finding CC-licensed images for use in your projects. Here is my search for “dogs”.

Here is the search results page. The photos are large enough to see some detail, but not too large that you have to frequently move to the next page. Also note that all the pictures are relatively accurate. That’s because sprixi search enables people to rate the quality of the search results.

Once you’ve found the image you want to use, click Use on the right and the search results slide to the left, revealing licensing terms, a download URL and even a link to the original image. Select the size you’d like to use and you’re ready to go.

Sprixi pulls images from flickr, OpenClipArt.org – and you. Everyone is encouraged to upload their images to sprixi.

The service is free to use and only requires registration if you want to upload your own photos directly to sprixi. [sprixi]

Disclosure of Material Connection: http://dsclzr.us/0

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Tags: flickr , Free Stock Images , free stock photos , Google Image Search , Photo Licensing , Photography , Search flickr , sprixi , Stock Photography