I have long relied upon Flickr's advanced search[1] for this purpose. It allows a Creative Commons license constraint for commercial usage or use as source material. The advantage to their search is with the combined video search and finer media segmenting.
They are "free" but with significant strings attached. The key thing about Splashbase is the images have almost zero strings attached. I say almost because even public domain images will have caveats; for instance, one cannot make it appear that someone is endorsing a product when they did no such thing, etc.
Right, it doesn't search sub-categories, so while not completely useless, it's merely next to useless (no efficient way to search the corpus of public domain images on Wikimedia Commons).
The main issue with pointing to Wikimedia is that it seems to funnel people into Creative Commons licenses. Maybe that is not the intent, but that is what happens. I like the idea of a prominent place that encourages the Public Domain.
Yeah, I recently had to make something commercial where I didn't think attribution was going to be possible, and I knew that SA wasn't going to fly. I figured I'd check out Wikimedia Commons but found it very hard to find truly public domain images. Though there might have been usable pictures available, I ended up just going out and taking one myself because the search wasn't really practical.
I also think a lot of people of the current generation probably don't think that much about licensing and copyright and don't realize how many strings they're attaching to the use of their image when they upload it, when my guess is that for most people, one of the CC licenses like CC-by-SA is essentially the same as releasing it into the public domain (for them), but of course it excludes it from inclusion into any non-CC works for likely over 100 years.
I love these sites, but unfortunately the amount of really useful photos you can find in these sites is pretty low, unless you don't really have boundaries on the subject.
Even then, I find these pictures incredibly difficult to use properly.
1) Even in the flat blur era, you can't illustrate everything with a cool and inspiring picture of a mountain or the slightly unsettling picture of a dark forest.
Sometimes the clients needs them smiling construction workers with all their safety gear in place. Good luck finding a picture like that on those free stock websites.
It's obvious that if you're doing client work you shouldn't even think of not billable options, there's really no reason to avoid Stocksy, Creative Market and other cool pay-per-picture services.
2)Although you may find the rare gem, these images are free because their quality is not that high (technically speaking, composition is usually pretty good). I increasingly find myself looking at headers of glorious full width websites with a clear noise in the dark areas that completely ruins the effect.
3) Originality is lost. We reached a tipping point where you can spot an unsplash picture from miles away.
Conclusion: use them as placeholders in new projects, use them for templates or themes you're selling, use them to illustrate your blog post about some inspiring stuff. Avoid them for a personal project you care about, abhor them for client work.
I think you should have the view and download buttons overlay the images...and only reveal them when a user hovers over an image (e.g. http://theme-fusion.com/themes/).
Currently, the buttons are bulky and awkward, especially when the screen is re-sized for mobile devices.
Clearly lacking content, but it's great to see these crop up and they inevitably get a few images other places don't have. I'm a fan of http://www.morguefile.com/ myself.
This is actually great. I was using Splash (http://unsplash.com/) a few days ago, and had to look at every image to find what I was looking for since there was no tags.
I run a website which uses a blurred photo as the background. I'd love an API from splashbase that I could poll daily for rotating in new images on my server.
By allowing browsers to cache the image preferably: everybody gets a random photo, which then sticks for a while, but if you want a new one, you can always just force reload the page. But of course, it all stands and falls with the selection of images.
I have no idea wether visitors get anything out of this, probably not, but I use random color schemes on my personal site and it makes it much more enjoyable for me to work on it. Most people only ever see one page or two, but I have seen thousands if not tens of thousands, and a bit of variety can go a long way :)
I'm a developer for Ticketbud, and we let our event organizers upload high-res background images on their event pages. If Splashbase had an API, I'd be keen to work it into our interface.
this site just copied all of unsplash.com's images and added tags to them.
the original site unplash.com, has infinite scroll.
there are only a few images in total so I don't think splashbase is necessary. It takes less than a minute of scrolling to get through the entire db of images.
[1] https://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/