The Creative Finder Adds Embed Function, Suddenly Becomes Great Image Source for Bloggers

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Last month we told you about Singapore-based DesignTAXI and its new portfolio site The Creative Finder which gives designers, photographers, and illustrators a place online to show off their works. Today we received word from Alex Goh, the founder at DesignTAXI, that The Creative Finder has added an interesting new feature to its repertoire.

Images on the web service can now be embedded on external websites, much as you could with a Flickr image or a YouTube video. The interesting part here is that once embedded, the image links back to the creators profile and features a credit on the bottom that attributes the image to them. Content creators can enable or disable embedding permissions according to their preference.

There’s also a fairly intrusive “The Creative Finder” logo, and that may or may not bother publishers who wish to embed the image. I’d be ok with it, but I’m not sure if everyone else would be.

For bloggers who find themselves in need of stock images, but don’t want to screw around search for creative commons licensed photos, this could an interesting solution. The selection is somewhat limited so far (a search for ‘dog’ only gives 10 results) but this should improve as more people put their images on the site. You can see an example of one of the embeds below:

As The Creative Finder has been online for more than a month now, I was curious to know if the users embed permissions would be switched on or off by default. Alex tells me that the option will be on by default, but they did send an opt-out email seven days before launch. While I’m never a fan of automatically opting-in users to something different than what they originally signed up for, users can disable permissions later, and any embed on the web will subsequently result in an error message.

For creatives who want to show off their work, the site has a freemium model with paid plans of $9.99 per month and $14.99 per month bringing a range of added features over the base plan. And the free plan is indeed pretty limited, as you can only publish up to 10 photos. But with the new embedded feature, it does mean that more people could potentially see your work. Personally, I still prefer to rock my own photo gallery.

In any case The Creative Finder does look like a very promising service. And this new embed feature is a solid step towards making it a little bit better, not just for creatives, but also for those who want to use their work with proper attribution.