Ioanni Mitsakis May 30th, 2014

Titania Foto: Free Photo Collections, Made in Germany

This is a rarity. We often introduce you to free commercial-use photo providers. Rarely any of these stem from Germany, the country were the Noupe world headquarters happen to reside. Of course we have the great resource Pixabay.com coming from here, but besides that, needle in a haystack and such. This new entry we found a few days ago is one of this rare species. Titania Foto, maintained by Tania Timpone, which actually does sound Italian, but anyway, offers quite a few photos and doesn't cost a cent.

Titania Foto: Round About 400 Photos in Stock

Tania Timpone from Northrhine-Westfalia in Germany loves to take photos and as she loves it, does it frequently. Most of her pictures are from travels around Germany and its European neighbours, with a slightly heavier focus on Italy than anywhere else. More than half of the 400 photos on Titania Foto represent landscapes, cityscapes and other nature-related imagery.

Loosely based on a WordPress theme by Sell Media, Tania Timpone installed a user-friendly photo database, which I wouldn't exactly call a state of the art presentation of a photographer's portfolio, but at least it does what you'd expect from it.

Using a free text search field, which you can limit to certain categories, resolutions or orientations, it is easy to find the very well tagged photos fast and carefully targeted. If you are more of the visual type or simply don't know exactly what you are looking for, you can simply browse the categories or use the tag cloud. You can also opt for a chronological list of all images available.

If the preview appeals to you, click on it to get to the image's detail view. From here you get access to all the relevant information on any given image, camera model used, size, shutter and more. From the detail page you download the image or add it to your lightbox. Adding images to the lightbox collects as many as you want to during your surf session and lets you easily download the images once you've finished browsing. To initiate a download, you need not switch to the detail page, though. On most of the pages, hovering an image shows a download button to the top right of the image.

Titania Foto: Backlink Appreciated, But Not Required

Note that the button "Download" does not actually start a download immediately. Instead you'll have to enter a valid email-address to which the download-link will then be mailed. Tania promises to not spam you. I believed her and didn't regret it up to now.

The photos are completely free to be used for any project you want to use them for. Tania appreciates every backlink, but does not require you to place one, nor tell anyone about her existence. What you are not entitled to do, is sell the photos or add them to third-party photo databases.

Most of the photos come unedited, at least that's my impression. Heavy pixel-editing has not taken place, probable slight optimizations have been made, yet not that I noticed. All the photos are what the world is willing to show you without forcing it to add more light, more depths, more shadow, less shadow. You name it.

Just like most of the other image providers, we introduced you to during the last months, Titania Foto does not want to compete with giants such as Shutterstock. So, don't expect to find a photo for any thinkable use case there. What you will find, though, are the photos Tania wanted to shoot. Chances are, you'll like at least some of them. Look at these examples: