Where to Find Free Stock Photos

Published on August 8, 2010 by Vic Richardson

 

Are you frustrated by the task of  looking for free art for your website?

Finding free photos and line art for a blog or personal website is often a quandry for the new developer. Copyright Laws and Royalties are complicated. Some pictures are entirely free with no strings attached. Others require a link or acknowledgement to the creator of that image. Others require a royalty fee paid to a site or individual. If a person is in the picture, you legally need a release form, signed by them, before using the image.

Sometimes, we just want clip art to make an article more visually appealing and hold the reader’s interest. To that end, I went on a quest to find the best sites to download restriction free images.

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What not to do:

1. Search Google Images for what you need. Yes, you’ll find it, but you will have no idea what the copyright restrictions are. Chances are, it came from a commercial site and IS copyrighted.

2. Find a website with the image you need and right click and download it. You know this is wrong (unless it is a known site for getting free stock photos).

3. Go to E-Bay and find someone selling the item that you need a picture of, then right click and download that picture. Chances are low of prosecution, if it is a private individual, but still it is not legal.

4. Go to Flickr and browse for the photo that you need. The photo copyrights are still owned by the uploader and you need to get permission.

Of course, all the above does not apply, if you diligently go after the creator of the image and get their permission. That’s a lot of effort for each image. After evaluating 100 sites, I found seven sites to get what you want, listed below, in order of excellence:

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Morguefile – No registration is required. It has a good search engine and there are lots of photos here. There is a Dreamstime tab on the search page that keeps trying to point you towards their paid site.

Stock.xchnge – Registration is required but there are no membership fees. There are a lot of images but istockphoto ads are above and below the free displayed ones and will distract you (and make you envious).

Wikipedia – Most Wikipedia pages have an image of the subject matter. Click on it and below the image will be the copyright information for that image. Many are free to use for non-commercial use.

Freestockphotography – No registration is required. Just start downloading. The image selection is limited.

Pixelperfectdigital – No sign-up is required here, either. The number of images is limited. At least there is not a lot of duplication between all these sites.

Stockvault – No registration is required. There are Dreamstime ads above and below the selection areas.

Dreamstime – A commercial stock photo site with a free area. Registration is required plus you have to enter a number code before downloading each image. They have an excellent selection with over 4000 images. However they are unsorted in one long string of pages.

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HINT: Don’t overlook the idea of using your amateur photography skills to create your own stock photos. Digital cameras are cheap and readers love original content.