Open Texture Library?

Hello! I'm Figglewatts and I've decided to start uploading some photo textures online. I'm gonna try to make a lot of them seamless but it depends on how busy I am! Otherwise I'll just be uploading lots of photos. I needed to go on more walks anyway...

All textures here are free to use for whatever the hell you want, no catch. All textures I put here will be licensed under the 'Do What The Fuck You Want To' Public License so that you can do what the fuck you want to them. Simply right-click and save (the NFT joke writes itself). No terms and conditions, no complicated license, the rest is up to you.

Why?

In short, based on this tweet.

In long, textures.com was a popular resource that people could use to get photo textures. It had a generous free tier and a pretty good paid plan, whereby you could pay for credits to spend on textures. You kept the credits for a while too - I still have some I bought over a year ago.

They changed their pricing model in 2024, making it a subscription service with time-limited credits, and removing the free tier. This severely limits access to their library, and makes it a lot more difficult for people to get textures. It's a move in line with 'enshittification', whereby platforms engage in rent-seeking behaviour in order to squeeze more money out of their users, at the cost of the benefit the platform provides for its users.

Earlier, in 2023, we also saw Unity try to do a similar thing.

This sort of thing just causes higher concentrations of power and wealth to go to the corporations running these platforms. As an indie developer, personally, after the events of 2023 I do not feel like corporations have my best interests in mind, and I don't think their way of doing business is in any way sustainable.

Typically, they are beholden to the shareholders, or 'other people's money' (OPM) and their goals are more in line with concentrating wealth in the shareholders direction and ensuring consistent growth. I believe this is entirely at odds with how the indie scene should work sustainably, so I think we need to take back control from the platforms we use to make our art.

Indies need to seize the means of our (game) production, and textures are a small part of this. And it's absolutely within our reach to have a huge, public, open texture library based solely on volunteer efforts. Please get in contact with me if you are interested in helping out.

Can I help?

Absolutely. I want to make an open texture library ideally, so if you want to help then get in touch. Ideally we can set up a small community of volunteers for this. You might be able to help with:

• Community management.
• Texture sourcing.
• Texture editing.
• Web development.
• Writing guides for making textures.
• Texture categorisation.
• Texture alteration (recolours, different skins etc.).
• Anything else! Open to suggestions.

Plans

My plans for this site are as follows:

• Open source it on GitHub so people can submit PRs with more textures.
• Improve the frontend with tagging/category/searching features (probably with HTMX).
• Add guides on how to take and edit photo textures (including making them seamless).
• Add textures as often as I can (every day?).
• See if it's worth starting a community around the idea of a public texture library and use this site as a funnel for that. Let me know if you are interested.