There are a ton of free stock photography out on the internet. A lot of them suck. Either because they don’t have really decent photos on them, because they’re hard to navigate, just a sham to get you to sign up for some premium photo service, or any number of other issues to frustrate the user. Heres a list of 5 that I use and recommend. They are all worth the few minutes it takes to sign up for an account.
First off, there is some confusion between the terms “free” and “Royalty Free”. So, to clear things up, “Royalty Free” photos are photos that you don’t need to pay the photographer a royalty (or licensing fee) each time you use the image in a project.
So without further ado, the list…
Stock.XCHNG
Stock.XCHNG is a great website for free Royalty Free photos. With over 30,000 contributing photographers, there is a varied selection of photos to choose from. One thing to keep in mind is that not all photos on Stock.XCHANG is Royalty Free. Make sure you check the licensing on each submission before using it. Many times, all it requires to get usage rights is writing the artist and asking permission to use their photo. Not a hard thing, and if you ask really nicely, and send them a link to your work, theres a good chance you could build a relationship with a talented artist.
MorgueFile
MorgueFile is a public archive of photos that are released into the public domain. There are a ton of great photos available here, contributed by talented photographers. All Royalty Free for you to use.
EveryStockPhoto
EveryStockPhoto is one of my favorite sites to use. It allows you to search a number of different photo archives such as MorgueFile, NASA, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons and four others. One of the nice features is a light box which lets you categorize and save your photo searches into sets for later access. Definitely one of my most used sites for photos.
OpenPhoto
Openphoto is a nice, simple site that allows easy and quick searching of photos using category tags. One of the features that I like about OpenPhoto is the “Similar Photos” function that displays other photos that are similar to the one you are currently looking at.
FreeRange
And finally FreeRange, which has a clean and helpful site layout that I like. I love the Newest Photos feature at the top of the main page which shows the 100 newest photos. In addition, theres the Most Popular Photos where you can see what the most popular photos currently are on the site. Besides being great for giving me inspiration off of a random photo for art sake, I also love to see what the current popular photos are, giving me an idea as to what the web is doing, image wise.
So there you have it. Thats my secrets to free Royalty Free images. Got any other favorites? Let me know in the comments. I love finding new sites.