Openclipart

History

The Openclipart library, sometimes abbreviated as OCAL (Open Clip Art Library), was started in early 2004 by Jon Phillips and Bryce Harrington, developers for vector graphics software Sodipodi, and later its fork, Inkscape. Openclipart initially grew out of a project started by Christian Schaller (Uraeus), who on October 26, 2003 issued a challenge on the Gnome Desktop website for users of Sodipodi to create a collection of flags in SVG format. The flag project progressed very well, resulting in a collection of over 90 flags made publicly available in SVG format, which lead to a broadening of the project goals to include generic clipart. The project became known as Openclipart by April 2004, with the stated aim of all contributed images being dedicated to the public domain.

In the early stages of the Openclipart project, a website was created that lacked thumbnails and was hard to browse. To help propagate the images in the library, downloadable Openclipart packages were released. These packages were available directly from the Openclipart website, or as an add-on for various Linux distributions including Fedora, or an NSIS installer for Windows. Each package included most of the clipart to date and were manually sorted into categories, a laborious process. The Openclipart package version 0.20 was released in 2010. The Openclipart packages received only a few more incremental updates during 2010, mostly for seasonal clipart.

An overhauled Openclipart 2.0 website went live as a beta in February 2010 with a full release in March 2010. The site introduced a change from the old ccHost software to the new AGPL-based Aiki Framework, a content management system made for Openclipart 2.0. The new site allowed anyone to browse and add to the Openclipart collection easily, and image thumbnails and improved search functions made the Openclipart library more accessible. These features contributed to increased use of the site, which was soon receiving over 5,000 unique visitors and 50,000 page views daily, and soon made the old packages redundant. This release culminated the work of Jon Phillips, Andy Fitzsimon, Bassel Safadi, Michi, Ronaldo Barbachano, and Brad Phillips who assisted in the launch of the new system.

The 3.0 website release incorporated a "favoriting" feature, allowing members to make note of their favorite clip art, and an image-editing option that makes the remixing of images significantly easier.

On April 15, 2013, Openclipart launched a new logo and updated website design using a "scissors" logo.

On March 12, 2014, Openclipart announced that Inkpad, an open source drawing app for Apple iPad, released library integration so that the entire collection is available to artists.

Present

As of late January 2017, Openclipart displays the works of over 5,800 artists who have contributed over 118,000 SVG graphics. The entire collection is available for free to download. All images are dedicated to the public domain by their contributors and are stored in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, with thumbnails in Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.

Packages and apps

Some Linux distributions, including Mandriva and Ubuntu, include many of the Openclipart collection releases, packaged as SVG, PNG or OpenDocument format files. These distributions are based on the 2005 pre-ccHost release, since regular releases stopped after the switch to ccHost software. Openclipart 0.19, the first version released after switch, was released in March 2009. With the recent release of version 2.0 and updated packages, distributions have bugs filed in their respective bug trackers to begin packaging Openclipart once more.

Openclipart was included on the cover discs in Linux Format issues 123 and 132 as a package of browseable SVG's from the Openclipart collection.