Yotophoto is a fast and easy to use image search engine. There are plenty of image search engines available of course, but that’s no reason why there shouldn’t be one more. The focus of Yotophoto however is on making ‘open and copyleft’ images available to educators, bloggers and digital artists. Consequently Yotophoto acts as a multi/meta search engine, scouring resources such as Flickr, Wikipedia, Stock.Xchng, Morguefile, Pixelperfect Digital and OpenPhoto for images in the public domain, or made available under CC, GNU FDL or similar licenses.
The interface is neat and tidy, easy to use and the results are displayed 20 at a time. Images are shown in thumbnail with source, type of license and size displayed below. Advanced search functionality allows for searches on all/any/exclude words, four types of license, 4 image sizes, 3 orientations (landscape, portrait and square) and finally color, either by hex value or from a chart.
This last is quite useful since it would be possible to find images that were the same color as a logo for example, or where photographs needed to fit into a specific website color scheme. I would have liked to have seen an option for b&w/greyscale though.
The searches that I ran all gave me good on topic results, in many cases different to those that I was getting from other image search engines. No need to worry about adult images either; I tried very hard to find some, but was pleased to see that I didn’t retrieve any (though searchers should always be wary in case something objectionable slips thru the net).
I don’t think that Yotophoto is going to replace your preferred image search engine, but it provides a useful twist and would be a good addition to the searching armory.