Free stock photos

Stock photos are images that have been taken in anticipation that they will be useful in the future. When you need a photo of a juicy hamburger or a pink cat, you will find one on a stock photo site.

image by Gerla Brakkee

Stock photos used to be produced by professional photographers and licensed for tens or hundreds of dollars per use, but now there is a huge range of fantastic images on the web available to be used freely. Sometimes there are “strings attached” such as a restriction to noncommercial use, or the requirement that the photographer is credited.

When I need a stock photo for a web page I’m putting together, my first port of call is always Stock Xchng, where there are over 200,000 photos. Registration is free and has been without hassles or spam, but you do need to register in order to download full-size images.

Just type in your search terms and browse the resulting photos. The photographer chooses the terms and conditions. All images are free of cost, but some require attribution or written permission for use. I always use images that are completely unrestricted, but I always credit the photographer anyway, and send them the URL. That way, if some future maintainer of the web page removes the attribution they are not in breach of the photographer’s conditions.

Many stock photos are produced for commercial purposes, and can be rather bland (see “Ten Top Stock Photography Cliches“), but there are lots of fresh ideas at Stock Xchng.

And I even contributed a few of my own photos to the site.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.