I use royalty free images a lot in my work. My two favorite sources are iStockphoto and Flickr Creative Commons. I like iStockphoto because of the quality and variety of their images. I appreciate the ease of using the site and the moderate cost. Flickr Creative Commons is a wellspring of member photos. There is no charge for the images and limited restrictions on their use. I highly recommend both.
If you’re a braver person than I am, you might want to check out xmarks. It lists 115 stock photo sites! But if you’d rather have a more manageable list, here are ten sites that won’t disappoint.
- gettyimages We offer the industry’s best and broadest collections of imagery and footage – including award-winning news, sport and entertainment content, plus rare and contemporary archival imagery. Our music collection provides a wide range of pre-cleared tracks from independent artists, chart-topping acts and popular soundtracks.
- stock.xchng Browse through the categories of our huge gallery containing over 350,000 quality stock photos by more than 30,000 photographers! Need a wallpaper for your desktop or illustration for your blog? Need a pic for your commercial website design? Looking for inspiration? Have a look around.
- MorgueFile The morguefile contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by visitors to the site. To acknowledge the artist’s accomplishments, we ask that you credit the photographer when possible.
- FreeFoto the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet (link back and attribution required).
- Dreamstime At Dreamstime you can find a large variety of Royalty-Free stock images. Thanks to the continual evolution and diversification of digital technologies, we are able to provide images of a very high quality at a completely convenient price. All the images are carefully scrutinized and selected, in order to make sure that only the best are included and that the range of subjects is extensive.
- BigStockPhoto Your fast, easy-to-use marketplace for quality stock images. We offer over 4 million royalty-free photographs and illustrations from talented photographers and artists around the globe, available for almost any purpose.
- photoXpress More images for your hard earned bucks! Choose from our flexible upgrade plans starting as low as $9.99! You’ll get 25x more photos for 20x less than the price of other big image sites! You won’t find prices better than that anywhere.
- Image*After Image*After is a large online free photo collection. You can download and use any image or texture from our site and use it in your own work, either personal or commercial.
- FreeDigitalPhotos Thousands of royalty free photos and illustrations for websites, newspapers, magazines, video and TV productions, iPhone applications, PowerPoint presentations, forums, blogs and school work.
- 123 Royalty Free Find that perfect photo with our vast content of 6,289,361 images here. Our friendly group of professional account managers worldwide are always ready to serve you anytime, round-the-clock.
Photo by iStockphoto
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Those are my two faves as well, Dan. For people in the US – well, probably for anyone – the Library of Congress has a fabulous online catalog
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
They warn that rights assessment is your own responsibility because the images come from various collections, but there are some wonderful images from FDR’s Depression era work programs that are in public domain.
You can get lost for days there.
@cj madigan. Thanks for the link to the Library of Congress, cj. I know what you mean about getting lost looking at photos!
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People are also welcome to use the free royalty free photos and images found on http://www.cjophoto.com/.
@CJ. Thanks for letting me know about your site.