Finding quality images and photos for complementing an important article, essay or news report is already a challenge for many. Imagine when the goal is not only to find good images, but also to find some that you could openly and freely use without needing to pay royalties or one-time publishing rights.

Nonetheless the task would seem, at first, a tough one to carry out; however, times are changing fast, and there were few and little-known online free image resources available — until today. New ones are appearing and offering a great assortment of quality pictures, an alternative to the expensive ones at traditional stock image libraries.

But as long as your subjects do not require photos of art masterpieces stored in world museums, or faces of popular stars, you may be likely to find highly interesting visual alternatives by exploring the world of free and grassroots image clearinghouses.

It's never been a secret that I feel one of the best resources of grassroots free images online is the Stock Exchange at http://sxc.hu, It's an impressive collection of many high-quality photos taken by amateur photographers from around the world. As a matter of fact, you can be one of the many contributors to this outstanding and fast growing image clearinghouse.

The images displayed at the Stock Exchange are searchable in multiple ways and offer thumbnail views that are large enough to provide a good glimpse of what the shots contain (unlike other alternative image libraries that have reduced the size of these thumbnails too much, which makes it harder to appreciate the image's content without loading a larger version of it — adding a lot of time to the overall searching process).

The Stock Exchange archives more than 100,000 images for which the photographers have established re-usage terms, leaving most of them available for immediate re-use.

But, it's difficult to access the Stock Exchange at times due to the increasing demand and the need to move everything to larger and more powerful servers. Until it settles down, this is the perfect time to look around and break out of the soothing and rewarding experience sxc.hu has been creating.

Here are interesting alternatives:

66) Fotogenika.net
http://www.fotogenika.net/modifica/igallery.asp

Fotogenika.net contains photos sorted into a handful of categories with subcategories. Images from this site "may be used freely for personal, educational and non-profit projects. You may not used them commercially, claim authorship and/or sell them."

A category page displays subcategory folders with thumbnails or thumbnail images only when there's no subcategory. The thumbnail pages display a brief description, a vote button and the number of views. When you click an image, its full size displays along with a disk icon so you can download it.

Some categories only have one page of photos while others you need to click Next to see more. It's a well-organized site that's easy to use and has a lovely collection. Its submission page rules clearly indicate the site aims to provide high quality images and it shows.

Updated: February 28, 2006

See also:

Finding Images Online
a Directory of Web Image Sites
by Paula Berinstein
http://www.berinsteinresearch.com/fiolinks.htm

To bloggers and online publishers.

No matter which sources you use, I recommend always crediting and — where possible — informing the authors that their work is used and published somewhere. To someone who has been so generous to offer his creative work for your own use, it is not much to offer full credit, acknowledgment, a link back and information about where the image is used. In this way, we allow the authors to use such free use for good credit and to show potential customers how their work is used.

To photographers.

The ageless issue of "How do I get work as a photographer if everyone wants me to have some experience and credential first?" is finally solved.

Expose some of your good photographic work for others to use and leverage the good exposure, visibility and credentials generated by this to build your reputation and price when bidding for work.

I am interested in listing other similar resources that you know about.

Photo credit: Carlos Paes

***
Thanks to Brain Kennemer and his blog about online image resources for inspiring me to research this subject in detail.

65) Mayang's Free Textures
http://www.mayang.com/textures/

Mayang's Free Texures is a library of over 3000 textures from architecture, building, fabric, man-made items, metal, nature, plants, stone and wood. Images are high quality resolution at 1600x1200 or larger with most at 2560x1920.

All images are free for all uses except for selling and they appreciate credit. The site has a mailing list for those who wish to be notified when new textures are added.

The download limit is 20 textures per day. The site lets you know how many you've downloaded. Each image comes with a caption describing it. The aerial view of Paris and other locales are amazing. Not all images look like background pictures especially the autos collection. So don't let the term "texture" throw you off.

64) Free Large Photos
http://freelargephotos.com/

Free Large Photos contains a collection of over 600 images and allows others to use the photos as long as credit is given and it's not used for making money. An RSS feed is available for the collection and here are the most requested photos.

Click any image to view its page and its full sized version and its categories. Each image comes with a short caption. The Paris Opera Garnier photo is gorgeous.

Get images covering outdoors, nature, travel, transportation and more. While it's a small collection, it's well done.