Resource sites that stay useful

U

Unsplash

Unsplash

Photographs, free to use including commercially, with no attribution required. The catch is that everyone else has the same photos, so it is a starting point rather than a brand.

P

Pexels

Pexels

The same idea with a larger video section, which is the reason to check it alongside Unsplash rather than instead of it.

P

Pixabay

Pixabay

Images, video, music and sound effects in one place under the same licence. Quality varies more than the dedicated sites, and the convenience is real.

O

OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap

Map data that is open rather than licensed per use, which is why it turns up inside everything from delivery apps to humanitarian logistics. Editing it is allowed, and often the point.

OW

Our World in Data

Oxford

Long-run statistics with the underlying data downloadable and the methodology written out. The charts are the shop window; the CSV files are the product.

K

Kaggle

Google

Datasets plus notebooks that show how other people handled them. The notebooks are the more underrated half: a working example beats a data dictionary.

HF

Hugging Face Datasets

Hugging Face

The default place to get a dataset into a script, because the loading is one line. Read the licence on each one; they differ more than the interface suggests.

A

arXiv

Cornell

Preprints before peer review, which is both its value and its hazard. The rate of publication is the point: in fast-moving fields the journal is already late.

PC

PubMed Central

NIH

Full text for the biomedical papers that are open, which is a large and growing share. The place to go when the abstract is not enough to answer the question.

Z

Zotero

Zotero

Reference manager that captures a citation from the browser tab you are reading. Open source and it works offline, which matters more than the feature list.

C

Calibre

Calibre

The ebook library manager that also converts between every format worth naming. Ugly, complete, and the only tool that does the whole job.

A

AlternativeTo

AlternativeTo

Crowdsourced replacement lists for software you are trying to leave. The signal is noisy and the coverage is the widest there is.

PH

Product Hunt

Product Hunt

What launched this week, which is exactly as useful as that sounds: good for awareness, unreliable as a quality signal because the ranking is a launch-day game.

FM

Free Music Archive

FMA

Music cleared for reuse, with the licence on every track. The catalogue is not current pop and it is not trying to be.

F

Freesound

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Sound effects uploaded by the people who recorded them, each with a stated licence. Searchable by how a sound is described rather than by name, which is the hard part.

SI

Simple Icons

Simple Icons

Brand marks as plain SVG files, free to use. The reason a directory site can show a logo beside every entry without touching anyone’s asset kit.

L

Lucide

Lucide

A consistent interface icon set with one stroke weight across the whole library, which is the thing hand-picked icons never manage.