15 websites offering free stock photos

A great list, but royalty free does not necessarily mean free to use on your blog since that is a distribution. Read the terms of use very carefully.

i have on basic question. can we use rf or cc or share or remix licensed images from these websites for commercial projects ?

Great resource for Stock Photos. Thanks!

Nice List . Thanks and tweeted

For me the pictures are too expensive for corbis for stockfotos on the side

Royalty free does not mean free of charge. It means free of extra Royalty charges dependant on use. Saying they are free is wrong, especially right next to the Corbis link, as Corbis is part of the Getty group who are very litigious. I think you really should edit your post immediately.

I sell photos at most of those sites. Royalty Free DOES NOT mean free. It means that you do not have to pay a royalty to the photographer each time you use the image but you do have to pay a one time licensing fee. Some of those sites do offer free images though.

Awesome sites for designers and bloggers

I can only advise everyone to carefully read the License Agreements of all services, before getting images from there.

From Corbis License Agreement:

18. Protection of Content: If use of Content is permitted on the Internet, or any other online or interactive media, You shall use Your best efforts to protect the Content to
ensure that it cannot be copied.

… which is impossible. If it shows in your browser, it is already copied. An no technical measure can prevent a user from getting it out of their browser’s cache or cutting it from a screenshot. Getty, which I was surprised to be missing in the list, has the same stupid restriction. It’s a real pity, because Corbis and Getty both have the most awesome search capabilities and material available.

Whenever I need stock photos nowadys, I use Stockxchange. The licensing is reasonable and cheap.

Corbis doesn’t absolutely give away free photos. Royalty free means that once you buy it you can use it ad nauseam. As opposed to rights managed which is stipulated on a case by case basis (e.g. I need a pic for a week, to use in a full page advert in a magazine with UK-wide distribution). And they answer you back “ok it’s £1000″.
Of course the really good pictures are rights managed.
This means that you can have exclusivity on a shoot for example, if you want a picture to be used as part of your national campaign for your company, you’d be pissed off to see the same picture used to sell bog roll on a local newspaper. But it’s expensive to do so. I remember paying £15000 for a picture with exclusivity for 2 years, for any media.

it is not really free to use.
gotta read the licensing stuff.
but nice list anyway.

Dreamstime is Royalty Free so the free images can be used for your blog. And do check our Refferal Program. Thanks for including us.

Incredible find, thanks.

Very useful listing for free photos. Thanks!

Nice post!! Thank you for sharing!

Consider this page bokmarked

umm, don’t you usually have to purchase the RF image and obtain a LICENSE before you can use it freely where you want??

Great resource page. Indeed, royalty Free means that the photo is licensed, and the licensee can use it without paying additional recurring charges. It does not mean it’s free.

Corbis never gives out anything for free. And royalty-free is entirely different thing. Please remove Corbis from this list, its misleading.

very nice thank you so much

I just spend half my lifetime reading this blog an dchecking up on the sites to see if the give away free photos, or just royalty free…

I only found roaltyfree – I found no stock photos for free og charge… Did I miss something??

Here is another one.

http://www.photovaco.com

High resolution photos for both personal and commercial projects without any restriction. All photos are completely free.

How free is ‘free’? Also many sites say ‘for personal use but not for commercial use’. If I use an image in an inhouse circulated free newsletter, wd it be ‘personal use’ or ‘commercial use’? What if I want to include the image in a marketing presentation about my company’s products and services?

I use photovaco.com too. Right on the front page it says:

“We provide free stock photos with high resolution for both personal and commercial projects. You can use our free photos in websites, video, TV production, forum, blogs, school projects and print medias including newspapers, magazine, books, CD covers. OK, let’s say, you can download, edit and use all photos anywhere and anyhow you like except for abuse.”

Cant get much more clearer than that.

Is nobody else utterly disgusted that these are being advertised as free? Royalty Free DOES NOT mean they are free to anybody who wants them

Just use Creative Commons-only search on Flickr

An other new free stock photo site:
http://www.rgbstock.com

Useful resources

Very useful indeed.
Thanks

Seems very useful, thanks.

As for me, the best one seems to be sxc – the largest and with nice quality compared to others..

Anyways, always read the license terms as they often make the image hard to use in your project.

I am building a list of stock photo resources too – listing free and cheap ones mainly (got now more than 50 resources listed) –
http://designbeginshere.com

Another way to get free design content – to use the cc license and search flickr for images under that license..

+ http://www.photl.com
Awesome resourse, i use it almost for every my new project and so far have been satisfied with it, though use sxc.hu rather often also.

thanks for this.