Freepik: The Search Engine for Free Photos and Vectors

Freepik is a new search engine which provides a method of searching for free resources, namely photographs and vectors drawings. For web or graphic designers working with a small (or zero) budget it appears to be a really great resource.

According to the creator’s web site “Freepik’s aim is to gather all free, high quality graphics on the Internet and make accessing them quick and easy so you don’t have to waste your time searching manually through hundreds of websites.”

How does it work?

The Freepik robots go out and visit new websites daily and browse for free photos and vectors. Images are assessed and listed in order of quality. When you use Freepik the search results provide a link back to the original location of the image. The owner of the photograph gets full credit and a link back to their site.

So does it work well?

Absolutely. I did a search for “Terrier” and the results returned a large pile (69) of some very high to medium quality photographs and 11 vector images. And best of all, they’re all free to download.

When you click on an image thumbnail you’ll see license information, the source of the image, how many times it’s been downloaded, image tags and information about the dimensions and resolution.

I really like the dominant color feature and perhaps in future updates of the search engine it would be possible to click to see similar images with similar color schemes. If you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for and have some time on your hands, you could take advantage of the links to “new ones,” most popular vectors and most popular photos to see what other people are looking at.

As a designer, I’m frequently searching for images, so for me this is definitely a site to be bookmarked and used.

Have you tried Freepik? What did you think of it?