Thursday, April 17, 2008

Comp Fight


[Image acquired via CompFight, taken by Neal Jennings, Creative Commons license: Some Rights Reserved]

I just discovered that a lot of designers use imagery from Flickr to build comps for clients. (I work for a large corporation that has a close, working relationship with the big photo houses as well as an in-house photography department and a pack of pit-bull lawyers that would rip us limb from limb if we ever pulled an image from a non-sanctioned source, so this is a new concept for me.) I can clearly see the advantage of using Flickr for comp purposes – tag-based searching, no watermarks and a wide array of images to use.

Since Flickr image borrowing is such a trend, two guys designed CompFight, a web-based service that uses the Flickr API to create a more robust method for searching for comp images.
CompFight does offer the option to search with the Creative Commons license "commercial use" specifically to keep the pit bull lawyers off your doorstep.

How do you feel about this service and designers using Flickr images for comps? Is this above-board or does it fall into some legal grey area?

1 comment:

Mr. Walters said...

I've used Flickr a few times for comping. This is usually after the big houses haven't delivered the kind of shot I was looking for (i.e. wrong angle, too many 1980s business people, etc.) and especially when I know we would shoot something specific for the project. Any tool to help search Flickr better for this sort of thing makes life a bit easier.