Need FREE photos for your designs? – 10 Great Places to Start!
If you’re an artist, designer, blogger – you most likely will run into the need for photos or textures. If you don’t have the budget to go to paid stock-sites, the good thing is that the free options out there are getting better and better!
In this article I’ve had a look at a whole bunch of free alternatives to save you some time and money.
Remember to read terms of use before using pictures though.
Here are 10 awesome places to start that can provide you with pretty much any kind of picture you want.
We hope these websites can be helpful for you – in your designs, when practicing your Photoshop skills and so on.
These websites are meant to give you a good variety of free photos. There are many, many more where they come from. If you start with these you should have most topics covered.
Enjoy!
Stock. XCHNG
Almost 400 000 pictures at the moment. This website is a favorite with many and I also use most of the pictures in my articles from this website. Most photos are good quality. Registration is required, but it’s completely free. Probably the biggest free stock photo website currently.
MorgueFile
More than 230 000 free images and great ways of sorting by category, color and more!
FreeFoto
FreeFoto currently has over 130 000 images available, in many categories. Good search feature, and usage is unrestricted. Just include an attribution link back.
PhotoRack
Over 27 000 files available in 149 categories. All pictures free for use, both for personal and commercial projects. No back-link required.
Stockvault
Over 18000 pictures right now. Pictures free for non-commercial use.
FreeImages
Over 5000 pictures on this site currently. All images at Free Images are free to use on websites and printed materials when you credit the site back.
Flickr (creative commons)
The creative commons section of Flickr is HUGE. We’re talking millions of pictures available under different licenses. Make sure you know the different licenses before you use anything!
Freerange
Photos found here can be used for personal and commercial use. Registration required to download high-quality, high-resolution photos (including textures). Photographers can get paid when users click on the ads next to their photos.
Photo laboratory (Photol)
Close to 380 000 pictures in their huge base. Between 10-15000 new images added monthly. 35Mb can be downloaded daily.
Everystockphoto
This final website we’re mentioning today – is Everystockphoto. It’s something as cool as a search-engine for Free Photos and indexes over 5 million images. Many useful features included here. Just make sure to read the licences!
These were the ten picks of where you can start to go for free stock photos. We know there are many competing sites out there and hope you find the list useful.
We’d love to hear what you think in the comments section below, and remember to share this article if you enjoyed it! Thanks 
July 5th, 2010 at 3:53 am
Thanks for posting this article, i think good photography is a very important part of a design, it can make or break a website. These sites are great for working on lower budget projects with little resources for expensive stock photography.
July 7th, 2010 at 1:23 am
wow.. great.. i really need this..
thanks
July 7th, 2010 at 8:06 am
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July 8th, 2010 at 11:33 am
Thanks for this! I browse SXC and MorgueFile quite often, but there are a few here that are new to me.
July 17th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Everystockphoto is a good website but the search usually returns a lot of irrelevant results. It is quite hard to find what you want.
I usually just stick to SXC and flickr. Got a lot of content and usually good quality.