I would like to welcome you to FreeSVGClipart! It probably seems odd to show up at a clipart site and not see a ton of clipart on the home page, but there is a reason for that but first let me introduce myself. My name is Lee and I have long been a fan and part of the Openclipart community. By day I spend most of my time coding for clients and the rest of the time it seems I spend driving my kids around. In between those times I like to work on other projects and that has now turned into FreeSVGClipart!
When the Openclipart site went down it was a great loss to the clipart community and to the Internet as a whole. Personally I had several work and personal projects on the go that were utilizing the Openclipart API and those projects suddenly ground to halt. As the downtime of Openclipart dragged on and the message on the Openclipart site gave little to no information many people, including myself looked to Twitter for answers. Unfortunately all that many of us got were odd replies asking to show love. There just seemed to be no answers and no one that could answer the question of what really happened.
Slowly there have been some new projects pop up that have offered some hope to the clipart community, most notably FreeSVG and ClipartZero. They are great projects, and they seem to be starting to get a following. It is nice to see the community starting to recover from the loss of Openclipart, but I realized that what those projects are offering are not what I need.
I want to lay out what is coming here at FreeSVGClipart and why I am spending my time and energy on this project.
First this site is about restoring as much of the Openclipart collection as possible. The complete collection of the original files from Openclipart will be made available in its entirety so anyone will be able to not only use the collection independent of any website. The original thought was to use Github for this, but the sheer size of the collection makes that impossible. At this point the collection will be uploaded to Google Drive and the link to the shared files will available on the site so anyone can have access to the files. As I type this the uploads have been running for a few hours now. The collection is available here for anyone who wants it. Note: This data has been removed to save on space and $$$.
Second, any new files that are added to this site will also be made available in the complete collection for anyone to access.
The point is that these files are not the property of anyone person or corporate entity and the community can do with them as they please.
Third, the API will be built out to enable as much use as possible. Currently I was able to build out a search API that defaults to searching titles. Searching by tags, creator and original Openclipart IDS is also available to registered users. Once the majority of the Openclipart collection has been added to the site the plan is to include PATCH and POST options to update and add new clipart to the collection.
To come is roughly 156,000+ clipart files. They are being uploaded based on how much information there is about the files. Many of the Openclipart SVG files have metadata included with them. Those files are first, second will be the files that we can gather some data from the filenames, and last will be the files that have very little information about. It will be an interesting journey and I look forward to working on this.
Daphne Laurel says:
Sorry, I don’t know if this is the right place to put comments, I just wanted to say what a wonderful website you have, I used to use open clip art a lot in the past, but haven’t used it for a while, I did not even know it was down so long, and seen your site mentioned on their twitter page, I would just like to say thank you for saving the clipart collection, we need more people like you in this world.
FreeSVGClipart says:
Thanks. It is getting there. Working on getting as many of the original items included as possible.