vector imageIt’s quite a difficult task to find clean, crisp, relevant, yet legal images to use on a Website. If you understand what copyright is you will know that you can’t just grab any old image you see on the web and place it on your own site. So where do you get images from? Stock photography is the answer for many web designers - well those that aren’t the sort that carry around a digital SLR in their bag anyway. The problem here for most small sites is that a good stock image doesn’t come cheap, and I hear you saying…”why pay when I can just download free images from the net”. Good question. To get to the point, your main concern here should be legality. I am certainly not going to trust any old “Free Clip-art download site” where you don’t so much as even see a legal notice or licence for the image you are getting. However I have found a few sources of free legal downloads of stock images where the licensing of the images is very clear. These photos are sometimes referred to as public domain images.
Free Stock Image sites:
SXC <- Has many free images, with some extra sharp premium paid images which cost.
Morgue File <- All free, a good source for images.
Dreamstime <- Has some free images, mostly pay images.
Image After <- All free images.
Vecteezy <- Very cool site with some free vector images, and sorted by licence type (source of bikini image above).

Good luck pic hunting.

www.pingable.org

2 Responses to “Free Stock Image Sites”

  1. Louisa on June 23rd, 2007 12:31 pm

    Hi Simon, Es told me about your site so thought I’d check it out. I’m impressed! One suggestion - I checked out the links for the free stock image sites so I’m assuming all your links are the same - they don’t open in a new window, so clickers are taken away from your site. Have a link open in a new window so that’s the secondary site, and yours is still the principal.
    Just a thought.
    Cheers, Louisa

  2. Simon on June 23rd, 2007 3:07 pm

    Thanks, for the suggestion and comment Louisa. It was very lazy of me to leave off Target=”_blank” from my links….I will sort that out. Cheers!

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