Free Stock Photos

In our never-ending quest to bring you the best free design tools from around the net we are going to cover free stock photos today. There are many free stock sites but the images can be quite poor – who wants a 1980′s business man holding a huge phone? Here we have dug out the very best for you …

Istockphoto – Number one on our list is not free but for the quality of images you can get for just over a dollar a piece its well worth mentioning. This really is my number one site for stock, you can also get a huge range of vector graphics.

SXC – Stock Exchange is a free stock photo site with a huge number of images from amateur photographers, this is probably the best free site available – the downside is the server is usually painfully slow; something you have to put up with for the free photos though.

Morgue File – A nice collection, again by amateurs which has been growing nicely. They also have a good collection of photography lessons for the budding photographers out there.

Yotophoto – Photograph search engine “indexing well over a quarter million Creative Commons, Public Domain, GNU FDL, and various other ‘copyleft’ images. “

Flickr – The creative commons section of flickr lets you search for images to use – always check the license on photos first though.

Stockvault – Not a huge collection at just 7,000 photos but we did find some really nice quality shots – worth checking out for sure.

Everystockphoto – Another photo search engine covering over 720k images so not quite “every stock photo” but some good quality shots were found here all the same.

Image After – 15k Free images and textures categorised and with search.

Free Photos Bank – Nice cleanly designed site which is easy to navigate to your chosen photos – Has a good selection of decent photographs.

Photocase – Some really great photography can be found on here – but I would recommend browsing the categories rather than using the search which seems to throw up random results ie. A search for car yields photos of buildings, rusty stuff and someones eye!

Photogen – Not a huge selection but the site looks promising, one to keep an eye on possibly.

Free Web Photo – Again, not a huge selection but a few gems in there that could come in handy.

DeviantArt Stockart – User submitted photos, collection is growing nicely but the standard isn’t as high as some of the other sites we’ve mentioned so far.

Photo Rack – 26k photos to choose from of a fairly high quality.

Links to more free photographs :

Pstutorials Blog – Huge collection of free photo sites, you’ll have to dig around to find the good ones though.

Where to Find Free Images and Visuals for My Blog – Another roundup of free photo sites.

As usual if you have any more to add to this list, please do so in the comments…