Clipart.com - Are Six Million Reasons Enough?

What's Hot:

If the sort of art provided is to your liking, then having six million items to choose from gives you a very good value. It's certainly a far greater number of images than any of the offline solutions.

What's Not:

The downside of the price to value for Clipart.com is, of course, the recurring fee. Unless you have a very regular need for clipart, the costs can build up. $160 per year is a lot less than hiring artists and designers to provide you with custom artwork, but its probably outside the scope of scrapbookers and people who want to add some art to their family web pages.

Paying $15 per each week in which you want to use some clipart is one alternative, if you only need the service a couple of times per year. You are allowed to download 1,000 images per day, so you could build up a collection of clipart you think you will need.

What's Hot:

This is a web application--there is no installation required. The web application is pure HTML and JavaScript--there are no plugins required.

What's Hot:

The thumbnails are large enough to get a good sense of an image. If you need to download a lot of images, you can add them to a shopping cart. Clipart.com will compress all of your art into a single file to download at the end of your session.

After you find an image, there is an option to search for other images based on its colors. After a search is done, you are shown how many of each image type are in the results; a single click further filters the results.

What's Not:

The limit of 49 thumbnails displayed at a time makes it hard to browse large search results.

What's Not:

Being a web application, there are always trade-offs of speed versus content. Local applications can display thousands of search results very quickly; the most that Clipart.com can show is 49 images at a time.

What's Hot:

The web interface is as fast as I think you could make it. It's very minimal and uses bandwidth wisely. There are no unnecessary round trips to the server when you change search options.

What's Not:

Clipart.com has chosen to limit the viewing to 49 thumbnails at a time, which means that paging through hundreds or thousands of search results is often not practical. The best workaround is to make your searches as limited as possible, though this does mean that sometimes you miss images.

What's Hot:

In the month I have had an account, Clipart.com has not sent me any unsolicited email. The account screen requires no personal information other than an email address, and all email is opt-in. There is a standard and very clear privacy policy on all pages.

What's Not:

Security is handled through a non-encrypted connection, which is disappointing (even though they do not record any credit card information).

The site lets you tell it to "remember me," but then doesn't ask for your password before allowing you to change sensitive information such as username or password. This is not how most sites handle "remember me."

What's Hot:

I found the application simple enough to use that I didn't require any help, but some people need handholding. The online help (http://www.clipart.com/en/support/showdoc?ID=1004&nvc_helpcat=0) is short but walks you through most of the things you will need.

What's Not:

Technical support is online only (http://www.clipart.com/en/company/support_form) and you're not even given an email address to use. For $160, I expect a little more than that.

What's Not:

While some people think "royalty-free" means you can do whatever you like with the images, this isn't quite true. There is a long list of things you can and can't do with the images. The terms of use are clearly linked on the site (http://www.clipart.com/en/company/terms) and you or your attorney should read them well, especially if you are using the images for business.