Open Clip Art Library

Rob wanted to know where I’ve been getting the clip art images on my recent posts. They’re from the seriously cool, but overly hard to use, Open Clip Art Library. They have a ton of SVG images so when combined with Inkscape can be converted to PNG images at any size. I wound up downloading an old archive release of the library which includes PNG versions of all the images and now use OS X to browse and search.

I’ve got a copy of each of the PNG images in their own directory which I can use coverflow to flick through, or I can use spotlight to search the full collection which includes text files containing the key words and info for each image. Combining the two I can easily find the image I want and preview a bunch of them. I then use the image editor built into EditLive! to add a drop shadow for that bit of extra polish.

The Open Clip Art Library seem to be in a sticky situation of trying to import all these old images into their new system so they can be better searched etc. The search seems to work fairly well, but lists the results as text rather than just letting you quickly see the image which is why the library is so hard to use. I definitely sense an EditLive! plugin in my future…

I’m keen to investigate the project some more and see if a little coding work couldn’t solve most of these issues, but getting started in a new code base takes time and I just haven’t had a big enough block of time to dig into it yet. It also seems like the project has only recently become active again which is a good sign.

So a big thanks to whoever the team is behind the open clip art library, it’s great stuff and hopefully I can jump in and help out soon.