10 great sources of Free Images for your next project
Article created on: April 22nd, 2010 - Latest update: March 9th, 2012
Finding the right image for your blog, website or, particularly, print work, can sometimes be a painful task. There are many great stock photo websites available where you can buy great images for quite affordable prices, but what about free images?
If you do blogging as a hobby or just want to create a rough layout for your clients, the best way is not always buying an image directly, but looking for some great free images instead.
In this article we made a (difficult) selection of 10 great sources for free images that don’t link directly to any stock photo gallery and that have, in the most part, a Creative Commons License, which lets you use the image with “some rights reserved”. But please be careful, using “free images” can be tricky, we recommend you to always read the exact usage restrictions for each image you use on any public work, or you can have problems in the future.
1. stock.xchng
This is probably the greatest free image source around! Recently bought by IstockPhoto, but still providing great free images to its users, sxc.hu offers 400.000+ photos for you to download and use. With a great community and hundreds of new photos uploaded every day, this is certainly the first place you want to go when looking for free images for your projects.
2. WikiMedia
Wikimedia.org is considered the Wikipedia for images. With a broad range of great quality, and free to use, images to choose from, this is certainly becoming one of the best sources for free quality images on the internet since it’s a wiki, meaning it’s populated by its users.
3. morgue File
morgueFile was created by Michael Connors back in 1996 as a personal project, when he still was a college student. It is a collaborative project, that contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by visitors to the site.
This website has a vast database of free images and a great usability, making it easy to navigate and search for the images you are looking for.
4. FreeRange Stock
With a very similar business model to stock.xchng (showing free and paid images together), FreeRange Stock offers a wide range of quality free images for its members to download, both for commercial and non-commercial usage. They require a simple registration to give you access to downloading the pictures, but it’s worth it.
5. FreeDigitalPhotos
Freedigitalphotos.net offer their low resolution images, mainly for web artists, free of charge to download. Higher resolution images (for offline printing) can then be purchased at prices that range from USD 5 to USD 10. This website offers some great quality images and also has an endless database of categories that you can browse.
6. Stock Vault
Stockvault.net was founded around 2001 by graphic designer and amateur photographer Bjorgvin Gudmundsson. This website offers designers & photographers to sign up and upload their images and visitors can also register as members to access advanced features such as; lightboxes, rating and e-mailing the photos.
With an average of 5.000 unique visitors on a daily basis with peeks of up to 50.000 visits on a single day, this can definitely be considered a great source for your “image inspiration”.
7. Photobucket
Photobucket.com, founded in 2003, is a website for uploading, sharing, linking and finding photos, videos and graphics. Its members can create a free account and start uploading media right away, which also made it a great resource for free images. Check it out, but be aware of any image usage restrictions since the members decide the license for their images.
8. Flickr under Creative Commons
Everybody has heard of Flickr and you probably even have your own free or pro account. The great news is that Flickr has its own “website” that targets all the Creative Commons licensed images on their database, and there are a lot of great images you can use for free!
Also recommended: http://compfight.com, a neat little website that uses Flickr API to show you results of search in an innovative way.
9. PhotoXpress
With a new and upgraded search engine and many very nice plugins to choose from, PhotoXpress offers its users a wide range of quality free images (650.000+), apart from their low-cost royalty free image catalog.
After doing your search on their website, make sure to select the “Free Images” tab and they’ll bring you all the free images you can download, after a quick resgistration.
10. Image-After
I personally don’t like their “pixel layout” very much, but Image-After offers its users more than 25.000 images and textures free of charge to use on their projects. You’ll notice that the quality of their images is far from being top notch, but it’s a great resource to get some inspiration.
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Great roundup, and I was just stuck on istockphoto. Glad I found this article.