Free Stock Photos by Email: Little Visuals

If you follow Noupe closely, you know that we covered pic-poster Unsplash.com quite a few times. This Tumblr-based service sends out emails containing 10 images with varying topics every 10 days. All the images can be used freely under a CC0 license. This allows for commercial use also. The even younger service Little Visuals would certainly win a look-alike contest…

Little Visuals: 7 Images Every 7 Days

Little Visuals from the UK does not send out 10 images every 10 days. Instead it sends out 7 images every 7 days. Other than Unsplash Little Visuals actually adds the images as a zip archive attachment to the email itself, while Unsplash only embeds links to the download source. The most recent weekly zip package can additionally be downloaded directly from the website. It is also possible to download the photos individually as they are presented chronologically in the form of a timeline, again similar to Unsplash.

If you want to get your package timely, you'll want to subscribe to the newsletter and make sure the zip reaches your inbox as soon as it gets released. If you don't want to subscribe to yet another service, either follow their Twitter account to get notified or try any other method of hold-file you're familiar with. All images are released to the Public Domain or - at least - licensed under CC0. Which means there are no restrictions as to what you can do or where you could use the images. Private as well as commercial use is perfectly fine, an attribution is not required.

A search feature is missed. If you want to discover the portfolio thematically, the only way to filter is clicking the tags beneath each photo to show other pix carrying the same tag. The photos come in resolutions of 12 megapixels onwards. The EXIF information does not contain the hardware used, at least not in the cases I looked at during my tests. There are tags named after camera brands though.

Downloading the weekly zip from the website is not always reliably possibly as Little Visuals uses Dropbox to serve as the public storage provider. Dropbox suspends the account quite frequently, when the traffic exceeds their internal threshold. At the time of this writing around 84 photos are available, which equals a life-time of 12 weeks. If you know Unsplash you'll find Little Visuals' choice of topics, moods, images strikingly similar to what you can find at the older service. Don't mistake that for criticism, though.

According to the content of a tweet from the official Twitter account, Little Visuals is a one-man project with all pictures being taken by the same photographer. The past 12 weeks saw this person post reliably. Let's hope this state endures...

Related Links

• Little Visuals | Website
• Little Visuals | Twitter Account