10 Affordable (or Free) Stock Photo Resources

I’ve been a fan of iStockPhoto for a long time. The Photoshop TV podcast turned me on to them when it first launched, and I’ve been a loyal customer since. They’ve worked to consistently improve their service, and really are one of the best sources of low cost stock images on the web. That said, I was still disappointed to learn they decided to raise their prices in 2008.

Comparatively, they’re still much cheaper than sites like Veer or Getty, which are far too expensive for “regular people” who just want the occasional photo to put on their blog… but if you want to expand your sources, here are some good ones for finding affordable (or free) royalty free images.

Boasting a huge selection of more than 3million images, you can buy small, medium and large images for $1, $3 and $5 respectively. Also of note is a cool zoom feature which spares you from loading another page (or popup) when browsing photos. Nice time saver.

Serves up a collection of nearly 350,000 free stock photos and various other images such as textured backgrounds and desktop wallpapers.

In association with Stock.xchng, Stockxpert grants you access to another very large gallery of stock images via subscription (unlimited downloads), or by micropay (per piece) and priced the same as fotolia.

Offers a growing selection of over 8,000 high res photos, templates and logos to use royalty free and free of charge. For an ad-driven site, they do a great job of emphasizing their offerings while keeping clutter to a minimum, making it fun and easy to hunt for images.

Though affiliated with StockVault, this site seems to have taken a few lessons (or at least been influenced) by iStockPhoto. It’s almost as nice to navigate, compares well in structure and offering and they claim to add thousands of new images weekly.

More ideas for finding freebies:

• Flickr - everyone has heard of Flickr, but did you know many members offer their work under Creative Commons there? You might want to check it out if you’re looking for something a little more rare, or different from the typical stock of the other sites.
• FreeFoto - offers some beautiful and exclusive images in exchange for attribution and a linkback (in most cases).
• EveryStockPhoto - a great looking image search engine where you can tag, rate and save collections of photos. A nice feature that designers might find useful for comping.
• Yotophoto - another image search engine which indexes thousands of images available under various formats such as Creative Commons, Public Domain and GNU.
• BurningWell.org - more public domain stock images. Not the most impressive selection but sometimes you can find a gem.

p.s. Saw this one on Photobucket when I was researching this post and had to smile…

Tags: content | licensing | publishing | resources | tools