Ancient Web: BurningWell Gave Its Stock Photographs Away

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Stock photography has always posed an awkward question for hobbyist publishers: where do you find a useful photograph without paying a licensing fee or using somebody else's work without permission?

Visit BurningWell.org.

The site offers one answer in unusually direct terms. Its photographs are contributed for public-domain reuse, and its albums group them into activities, animals, cityscapes, landscapes, people, plants, objects, and textures. The homepage retains a guest comment dated April 22, 2006 thanking the project for images used in church presentations, providing tangible evidence that the service was already operating by then.

The user FAQ explains its origin. The founder was preparing a pamphlet and had difficulty finding unrestricted high-resolution photos. Since they also owned pictures they were willing to share, they built a place where photographers could donate material for others to reuse.

Free pictures still need rules

The donor FAQ asks for reasonably high-resolution JPEGs and explains the handling of recognizable people through model releases. It explicitly warns potential donors that releasing an image into the public domain is not something they can take back from everyone who has already downloaded it.

The terms also preserve a wonderfully period-specific infrastructure detail. Visitors are asked not to scrape more than a small fraction of the collection because the host lacks bandwidth for bulk transfers. Anyone needing everything is encouraged to arrange a copy directly, even by DVD. A website was both a communal resource and a server someone had to pay to operate.

The gallery retains old-style album navigation, image tags, comments, and RSS feeds. Its textures area names Titus Tscharntke as a volunteer administrator and invites contributors making graphics for games or three-dimensional models.

The site's public-domain status is its own declaration and donor policy; a user planning sensitive commercial reuse should still verify any image's provenance and necessary releases. The photo library remains accessible, but neither a homepage count nor one guest comment proves an exact founding year.

What survives is an unusually explicit argument that ordinary people could make better publishing resources by choosing to share their work freely.

Browse the photo albums and read the contributor rules.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.