Free Stock Photo Websites
Finding High Quality Imagery can Give Graphic Designs a Cutting Edge
Dec 18, 2008
Knowing how to find good quality free stock photos is a vital skill for graphic designers who are working for clients with limited budgets. Big name stock photo sites can charge up to hundreds of dollars for a single image and while this may seem a reasonable business expense for a large corporate with an equally large design budget. Small businesses will often hope to have a complete flyer designed for the same cost.
A good graphic designer can use intelligent and effective typography to produce a stunning design, however in the real world many design projects require the use of photos or other graphics to grab the attention of the intended audience and many clients will insist on the use of good, punchy imagery.
Fortunately the internet has seen the rise of a number of sites over the last few years that offer free and good quality stock photos; there are also a number of 'microstock' sites that offer stock photos at much lower cost than the big established businesses.
MorgueFile
For years MorgueFile has consistently offered high quality free stock photos, with an ever increasing range of images, and these can be found through the site's search system. All images made available here are offered free of restrictions, meaning designers can use them in any commercial project without crediting the photographer. Note that designers may not claim ownership of the image or just sell prints of the picture.
Stock.xchng
With more than 380,000 images available to choose from at the time of writing, stock.xchng is another site that every designer should have bookmarked. Again, a search feature makes finding specific types of images easy. While there are general accepted usage terms that apply to all images on the site, it should be noted that these are a little more involved than MorgueFile's and, furthermore, individual images may also have some other special instructions, such as crediting the photographer.
Flickr
Possibly the biggest and best known of all the image sites on the web. Though not truly a stock photo site, flickr can be a great source of free stock photos, although special care should be taken when checking the licence agreement under which an image is offered. Unlike true free stock photo sites, images on flickr have many different terms of usage and restrictions applied to them.
These are just a few options for sourcing free stock photos and many more can be found by searching for 'free stock photos' or other similar search terms in any of the big search engines.
The choice available can be quite overwhelming and it's easy to be distracted when browsing through stock photo sites, such is the quality of many of the images. The most important point to remember at all times though is to check the terms of usage.
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