The Free Graphics Store

You can find a full, formal statement of the policies we operate The Free Graphics Store under on our Privacy page.

But here's what they boil down to in a nutshell:

We adhere to the Australian Government's Information Privacy Principles, which means that we don't spy on our visitors and respect your right to anonymity
We also abide by the Australian Spam Act 2003, which means we don't spam and we don't do business with anyone who does
Companies who serve ads on our site may track users using cookies or web beacons, but this is only to help serve targeted ads that may be of interest to you. In general, our ad-serving partners have the same attitude to privacy and spam that we do. And you can read their own privacy and anti-spam policies on their own web sites
We try to be as fair, impartial and accurate as we can with our software and other reviews. But if you believe we have something wrong (eg: a feature, a link etc) you're most welcome to email us about it at any time. We'll happily amend anything which is in error.

The Free Graphics Store is run by Australian Cybermalls to thank you for taking the time to visit us. You can contact us about anything relating to The Free Graphics Store that's not covered on this page by emailing us.

Roughly 10% to 20% of all people who surf the Net will - at some time or another - try their hand at web page design. It could be a personal home page, a business page or something else.

When you try this you'll quickly discover that two things you really need are good web graphics and good web software. We try to provide both of them for you here - along with many other useful resources and bolt-ons that will help you build a snappy site fast!

All graphics provided on our site are - to the very best of our knowledge - in the public domain (and we'd certainly appreciate hearing about it if they're not!). You can make use of them in any way you like providing you observe the few commonsense restrictions outlined further below.

They come from graphics collections we own ourselves, from other great public graphics archives that existed on the Net, from our talented guest artists or - in a growing number of cases - from material we've created ourselves from scratch.

Back when The Free Graphics Store started most of the world was on dial-up and we tried to keep all our pages within the range of 30K to 80K so they'd load fast and so that our site would be quick and easy for most people to use.

From 2008 onwards broadband has become much more widespread and we've also found that most (though not all) of our audience now either use broadband or is planning to do so in the foreseeable future.

This being so, our 2008 Version 3.0 redesign has been made with broadband in mind. This means we've reduced the number of pages we used to have (to save you time) but also increased the weight of those pages (generally to 200K or so).

At an average dial-up speed of 1k/sec, this means that our revised graphics pages may take up to 3 minutes to completely load for dial-up users (which isn't great, we know, but is within most people's tolerance levels). But for broadband users they should load in a moment or two.

No, we're really sorry. Whatever it is you're looking for, if it's not on display here we really don't have it. And we hope you'll understand that we don't have enough time to try to locate it or create it for you either.

We certainly do try to expand our library in the directions our visitors indicate to us (so you're most welcome to email us and let us know about your preferences). But we regret that we can't respond to individual requests.

However, if you're looking for a particular type of graphic, why not try the other great graphics libraries that we've listed for you in our Resources section? Or perhaps use our site's Google Custom Search facility? They'll probably help save you hours of searching.

We regret that we're unable to provide you with any one-on-one HTML or web authoring advice. As with sourcing specific graphics (above), it's not that we're unsympathetic (gosh! everyone has to start somewhere). It's just that providing HTML advice or checking web pages is outside our scope. There simply aren't enough hours in the day....

But if you're new to the web or HTML in general and need assistance in this area, can we suggest you take a look at the HTML links in our Resources section or use our custom Google site search facility? One or both of these should provide exactly the sort of assistance you require!

We often get approached by publishing companies and authors producing books on web design who'd like to include our graphics on their companion ROMs. We have a soft spot for genuine educational publishers producing publications for students and we like to help them wherever we can.

We're a little less enthusiastic about authors producing their own publications who'd like us to help them make a profit by providing our content to them for free (most other people probably would be too). But if you're a publisher, you're most welcome to approach us by email. We know that individual proposals vary widely, and we promise we'll look at each request with an open mind.

No. In June 2000 our hosting company image-protected our server to prevent this. But there's no longer any reason to directly link to our graphics anyway! You can either clip individual images from our libraries through your browser, or download all the images on each page as a ZIP file.

Graphics stay in our archives indefinitely. The archives are growing all the time as we create and add more images. And our site has been online continuously since 1996, during which time we've received (and, we hope, assisted) literally millions of visitors.

You can easily download graphics from our site in two ways if you're using a Firefox or Microsoft browser.

You can either clip individual images from pages by moving your mouse cursor over the image of your choice, holding down your right mouse button and selecting "Save Image As..." or "Save Picture As..." from the pop-up menu to save the image from the screen to your hard drive (Mac users: just hold down your main mouse button).

You can also now make use of our on-screen FTP facilities to download all images from a page as a Winzip file (most zips are 200K or less, and we certify they're malware free).

If you're not using Firefox or Internet Explorer then you're in the tiny minority that doesn't use a mainstream browser and you may run into difficulties with both these methods. We're sorry, but we can't help in this case.

Similarly, if you're using some versions of WebTV you can't download anything from the Net. Again, we're sorry but we can't help you. You'll need to consult your WebTV user manual or supplier.

You're free to use our graphics on private or commercial sites, and you're free to acknowledge us as the source (or not) providing you observe a couple of common-sense restrictions. They're not complicated, but they are important:

You can't resell these graphics. Most of the original authors (and that includes us) made these graphics available freely to the Internet community. Each graphic, however, represents a lot of work by some person at some time. So reselling them (by bundling them into a collection or charging your clients a fee for something you obtained for free) is unethical and violates the spirit in which these were works were produced. It's also illegal. If you're a web author, you can certainly charge for the work involved in mounting these graphics onto a page you've designed or making adjustments to them. But you can't charge a fee for the graphics themselves. OK?
You can't claim authorship of these graphics. We don't know who most of the original authors of these graphics are (except the ones we've created ourselves, or the work of our guest artists). But trying to pass off someone else's work as your own is also wrong and illegal. If you're a web author you can certainly claim copyright over any design that makes use of our graphics, but not over the graphics themselves. Copyright on the graphics always resides with the original author, even if they've put their work into the public domain.
Finally, you may not copy our pages and create your own instant graphics library on the Internet, an intranet or a CD-ROM with them. We've invested hundreds of hours building up The Free Graphics Store. This includes sourcing or creating the graphics, juggling the images to get the page weightings correct, retouching or converting formats... and then paying the substantial bandwidth bills it takes to operate everything. We haven't stopped to add all of this up but it's quite a lot. We simply ask you to respect that, and to recognise that if you don't you'll always be found out and the consequences could be unfortunate. If you want to add a graphics library to your own site then by all means feel free to include ours via a framed or unframed link to our front page at http://ausmall.com.au/freegraf or our master graphics archive at http://ausmall.com.au/freegraf/freegrfa.php.

Yes, you certainly can! (and we always appreciate it when people do this).

The two best URLs to link to are our front page at http://ausmall.com.au/freegraf or our equally popular archives index page at http://ausmall.com.au/freegraf/freegrfa.php.

We don't currently have special buttons or banners - but for speed, most people prefer text links anyway.

And thankyou!

This page last updated: 04-Sep-2008