See immediately what readers had to say
View 130 comments
Finding free images for your blog to complement an important article, essay or news report is already a challenge for many people. 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. Luckily there are many online services that come to rescue.
Nonetheless finding free images for your blog may seem, at first, a tough task to carry out, there are quite a number of online free image resources available today. These services are offering a great assortment of quality pictures and are establishing as a valuable alternative to traditional stock image libraries.
As long as your customers or you do not require photos of art masterpieces, you might find 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 stock.xchng, 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.
Stock.xchng archives more than 100,000 images for which the photographers have established re-usage terms, leaving most of them available for immediate re-use. You can browse the library in multiple ways and the thumbnail views that are large enough to provide a good glimpse of what the picture contains. images are also available in different sizes so you can always obtain the best result for your design efforts.
But stock.xchng is just one of the alternatives available out there. If you want to have access to thousands great free images for your blog, take a look at this collection of resources that I have put together in the last few years:
-
82) Photoree
http://www.photoree.com/
Photoree is a free web service that helps you discover random images that are (mostly) under a Creative Commons license.
You have to register to the site and Photoree will create a personal filter for you. Any time you browse and rate a photo, your personal filter will tune in with your likings by showing you only images that are relevant to your own tastes.
For each photo you can check if the image is CC licensed and which specific type of license is associated.
-
81) PD Photo
http://www.pdphoto.org/
PD Photo is a free public domain photo database with a large section of royalty-free images.
You can browse the free library and without even registering, download all the images you need. All images are served in standard quality and some are available in high-quality for a small fee. Please pay attention to the license credit below each image before downloading, as not all the images available on the site are royalty-free.
-
80) Dreamstime
http://www.dreamstime.com/free-photos
Dreamstime is an online supplier of stock photographs with a large section dedicated to free images.
You just have to register to the service to browse the free library and download all the images you want at absolutely no expense. Images are all in high-quality and of large size. You can either search for the images you need by keywords or by using the internal search engine.
Photographers are allowed to upload their own images for free.
