As you probably already know, Flickr is a brilliant photo sharing community. It allows photographers to share their art with the world, and allows people like graphic designers to find that kitten picture to complete their design:

Airtight interactive

Probably the most minimalist, and one of the most attractive Flickr browsers you’ll find on the web.

You’re simply met with a white entry field and a button that says go, the rest is up to you.

Perhaps the best feature of this browser is the ‘wheel’ of related options around the outside. – this makes the airtight browser perfect for anyone who doesn’t know what they’re looking for.

I wouldn’t say that this is the best Flick browser out there, but it is certainly one of the funnest and simplest.

Compfight

On pretty much the other end of the spectrum is this browser from Compfight. This is the browser I use when I want to find images to use for work, and websites. This is because of one helpful feature.

The Compfight browser has a little search option whish allows you to only search for images that are 100% free to use for any application. – Which is ideal for the working graphic designer, n’est-ce pas?

usability: 8 appearance: 7 practicality: 9

On the topic of creative commons, it would be unfair not to mention creativecommons.org.

This is a search engine which allows to you trawl a number of sites for content for commercial purposes, as well as just being a Flickr browser, it also searches Google, Yahoo and others too!

However, it’s worth mentioning that the whole thing is a little clumsy and bulky. It essentially just adds an extra search frame to the top of Flickr, meaning I only got 1 and 1/2 pictures on the screen before I had to scroll down.

usability: 6 appearance: 4 practicality: 8

Picture Sandbox

Picture Sandbox gets a mention simply for the sheer volume of images you can find, it allows you to search any one of 7 image sharing sites. However, it’s interface lets this site down. There are so many images on a page that it’s quite difficult to scan them all for something you might like, clicking on one brings it into a pop-up box, but for some images, this only makes it about 50% bigger. So get ready to squint if you want to use this!

usability: 5 appearance: 6 practicality: 6

Picitup

Picitup is perhaps the most innovative of all of the Flickr browsers and searchers. It doesn’t look very special, but it has an option which allows you to filter your results by faces, landscapes, products and color. For example: the search I have on the left has been filtered for the color green, so that all of the results have green as the primary color. Cool eh?

usability: 8 appearance: 7 practicality: 8

all in all, I would reccommend the Compfight browser to anyone looking for that perfect picture, it’s quick, easy and it gets the job done!

Now, go buy a kitten.

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