D20.photos: A Public Domain D&d Image Repository

I bought the domain d20.photos on Nov 23rd, 2018 with the goal of building a free-to-use, public-domain image hosting service for D&D, Pathfinder, and other fantasy RPGs. Today, that goal is realized.

Finding images for your D&D campaigns is really difficult, especially if you're looking to sell your campaign. Most artwork isn't licensed in a way that makes it easy for low-budget creators to use and often there's no way to easily find images for settings or places in your game. d20.photos aims to change that by providing a free, community-driven, human-curated image hosting service for D&D/Pathfinder related images. d20.photos aims to be a one-stop-shop for all your image needs. Since all images on the site are released into the Public Domain, you can be sure that you're ok to use, re-use, modify, them and even include them in your paid campaign or story.

I've been collecting images for years (over 100) with the goal of eventually adding them to a service like this. I have a lot more to upload, and anyone in the D&D community can do the same.

Abstract Images

One common problem for campaign or story writers is that while there are a plethora of photos on the Web that they can use in their games, pictures of the real-world are often too real. I know I will almost always choose a painting or other artwork over a photo even if they're harder to find. d20.photos tries to solve this problem as well.

Whenever a new photo is approved, a computer-generated version of the image is created by a wonderful open-source library called Primitive by Michael Fogleman. The library uses primitive shapes (in this case triangles) of various colors and sizes to reproduce the original image. These primitive, or abstract, versions are often really beautiful and have a certain fantasy air about them. Adventurer's Codex actually uses these primitive images too on the landing pages.

I find that these abstract versions "feel" more appropriate for a fantasy game and while Primitive does struggle with images with a ton of fine detail (like photos with lots of trees), it's certainly better than nothing.

The Environment (Again)

Like Nine9s.cloud, d20.photos is hosted in London in a datacenter powered by 92% clean and renewable energy. d20.photos runs on the same size of server as Nine9s, so I didn't need to recalculate the environmental impact. Unless I just can't make it work, I think I'm going to be hosting most of my software in the Linode U.K. datacenter from now on, or at least until one of their U.S. partners commits to using renewable energy in the same way. It's not a big thing, but it's a thing I can do.

I hope d20.photos is useful to you, and if it is, I'd love to hear about it. The site is donation based, so if you like what you see, please consider supporting it. If enough people do, it'll be a lot easier to justify improving it in the future.