Let’s face it, most of us don’t create every single image and icon when we do web design. It is not because we can’t but merely because we’ve got better options. Kudos to many designers and their generosity, there are in fact a lot of really nice creative common images and icons on the Internet we can take advantage. All we need to know is – where to find them.

In this post, we want to bring to your attention some of the really great search engines that will come in handy when it comes to image and icon search. Full list after jump!

Image Search Engines

• EveryStockPhoto

  A search engine for free photos come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo’s license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos.

  

• Xcavator

  Xcavator.net is a stock photo search portal for the creative community. You can quickly browse the way you think – visually – through millions of stock images.

  

• Ginipic

  Ginipic takes image search to a whole new level. Now you can search image search engines, photo sharing websites or your own local picture collections simultaneously.

  

• GazoPa

  GazoPa is a next generation similar image search engine in private beta. Users can search images from the web based on user’s own photo, drawings, images found on the web and keywords.

  

• FreeFoto

  FreeFoto.com is the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet. FreeFoto.com features exclusive images found nowhere else on the web with new pictures being added every week.

  

• TurboPhoto – Free Stock Images

  Browse and download 2,000 (3.4 GB) free stock images from 10 categories (view all thumbnails below). Stock images are in the public domain.

  

• Feelimage

  Feelimage is not only key words search. It is also equipped phrase search, that is images search engine ‘FeelPhrase®‘.
  It’s corresponding 127 colors, and has a technology that quantifies colors like ‘red’ ‘ blue’ in images.

  

• oSkope

  oSkope is a visual search assistant that lets you browse and organize items from Amazon, Ebay, Flickr, Fotolia, Yahoo!Image Search and YouTube in an intuitive way.

  

• Incogna

  Incogna process the shape in every image and use this to build a large scale searchable visual index.

  

• Imagery

  Imagery search executes an keyword search and rollover results to get photo dimensions and options to open the source page or the image itself.

  

• ImageBase

  The ImageBase is a searchable image and text database of objects from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

  

• Pixolu

  An image search engine which lets you go deeper into the mechanism of image search and lets you find more relevant images using the image results it displays the first time you search.

  

• Picsearch

  Search the web for images. An image search service with more than 3,000,000,000 pictures.

  

• Picitup

  Picitup is a leading web 3.0 developer and provider of content based image search services.

  

• PicFog

  PicFog provides a real time image search.

  

• PicFindr

  PicFindr is a rich internet application (RIA) that helps you search several stock image and photo community sites simultaneously.

  

• Pixsy

  Pixsy powers video and image search experiences for some of the Internet’s leading brands including Pearson, Lycos, National Lampoon, Cooliris, BuddyTV, Infospace, and many others.

  

• Biomed-Search

  Search for images from biomedical articles. Currently over 1 Million images have been indexed. BioMed Seach indexes image captions along with the citations to these images.

  

• Bing Image Search

  An image search engine on Bing.

  

• Compfight

  A Flickr image search tool.

  

• Tiltomo

  Tiltomo, where you can play with our Visual Search code using two sample databases from flickr.

  

• Altavista Image Search

  Altavista image search tool.

  

• Photogen

  The source for quality, high-res FREE stock photos and images.

  

• Yahoo! Image Search

  Image search engine on Yahoo!

  

• Google Image Search

  A very powerful image search engine provided by Google.

  

• facesaerch

  Enter a name and search for faces!

  

• Multicolr

  With the Multicolr Search Lab, you can browse through 10 million of Flickr’s most ‘interesting’ Creative Commons images, and find ones that share the same colours.

  

• PicBrk

  A real time image search.

  

• PD Photo

  PDPhoto.org is a repository for public domain photos.

  

• Stock.XCHNG

  Stock.XCHNG lets you browse through the categories of our huge gallery containing over 350.000 quality stock photos by more than 30.000 photographers!

  

Icon Search Engines

• Challenger IconDB

  Challenger IconDB (Icon Database) is a database that contains icons of various sizes and keywords attached to them.

  

• ICONLOOK

  ICONlook.com is a place where to find your icons and offers a pretty handy interface for searching and downloading icon files.

  

• Icons-Search

  The Icons-Search is an Icon Search Engine that helps you to find quality icons available on the Internet. You can find icons for Windows Vista and XP, Macintosh, Linux, icons for Desktop, Software, Website, Mobile, Presentation, in sizes from 16×16 to 256×256 in PNG format and sizes from 16×16 to 128×128 in ICO format.

  

• Iconlet

  Iconlet is simple search engine for free icons, images. For every image user get information about author, image resolution, graphics format and license type.

  

• IconFinder

  Iconfinder provides high quality icons for webdesigners and developers in an easy and efficient way.

  

• IconSeeker

  The IconSeeker.com is an icon search engine on web, it contents about 50,000+ high quaility icons and each icon has PNG, ICO and ICNS formats for Windows, Macintosh and Linux Systems.

  

• Icon Library

  

• EasyIconFinder

  EasyIconFinder is a new Icon Search Engine that helps you find quality icons now available simple by filling in a keyword !

  

• Free Icons Web

  Free Icons Web is where you can browse and download Over 15,000 high quality Free Icons for Windows, Macintosh and Linux Systems.

  

• Very Icon

  The VeryIcom.com is a icon search engine, it contents over 20000 high quaility web icons in more than 1000 icon packs. Each Icon has serval file formats such as PNG, ICO, you can free browse and download for Windows, Macintosh and Linux Systems.

  

• IconsPedia

  Search and download free icons in PNG format. Arranged by categories, that include animals, food and phones.