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:

78) Cyclo.ps
http://cyclo.ps/

Cyclo.ps is a search engine that helps you find free images to use inside your projects. Cyclo.ps searches all major stock images services on the web like Flickr, Stock.xchng, Fotolia, Cutcaster and many others.

You can manually select which image site you want to search, or search on all sites at once. Just roll-over with your mouse on the results to see a big preview of the image or click on the image to go to its page to download or purchase the picture.

77) Freepixels
http://www.freepixels.com/

Freepixels is a royalty-free gallery that contains high resolution free images you can use to illustrate your website or service brochure.

You can search for the images you need using the built-in search engine, also narrowing down your search for specific tags, dates or formats.

Images cannot be uploaded to the service.

76) Cutcaster
http://www.cutcaster.com/

Cutcaster is a marketplace of photography and vector illustrations where you can purchase royalty-free images for use in publishing, advertising, electronic usage on websites, and more.

If you are a buyer, you just need to register to the service and browse the library to find the photo you need. You can use several filters and categories to restrict your search. Once you found an image you want to purchase, you can either buy it immediately or bid on the image.

In case you are a seller, after registration you can submit your own images for free to the service and set the retail price. The image is reviewed by the Cutcaster crew and then, if approved, put on sale. When someone makes a bid for an image of yours, you can either accept, decline or submit a new offer back.