Compfight: A Flickr Search Tool

finding the perfect photo for a comp is such a timesuck. how long do you spend sifting through the pages and pages of thumbnails at [insert stock house here] when you're not even sure an idea is going to fly? or, for that matter, when you know you're going to have a photo shoot anyway, but you still need to find a great stock shot to sell the idea to a client. ugh.

now there's another tool to help you out: Compfight is a Flickr search tool that lets you enter tags and then immediately searches to millions of photos on the site and serves them up to you. If you get weak results you can search by "text only" which will then pull from descriptions and titles as well.

of course, there is a downside here. as our art buyer warned us: for legal reasons we can't actually use Flickr photos in our ads, so we wouldn't want our clients falling in love with a photo they can't have. but! i'm thinking this could be a great tool for finding outdoor environments to put our ads on (say, a bus shelter). happy searching.