Favorite Sites Providing Free Images

There are times when we need images or pictures to just spice up a blog post. And me, as a web designer I am definitely need pictures (mostly with a good quality), just to complete the design or just as an image-holder until the client provide me their own pictures.

I do love photography as a hobby, but most of the time my photos collection won’t be good enough or just irrelevant with the client needs. For the blog post probably it’s more easy for me to just use from our photos collection. Our Flickr account has already contain 5000+ of photos. Yet I still feel need to hunt and collect more and more photos from the internet.

And this is a couples of my favorite sites to satisfy the hunger.

Cresctock provides daily free stock image, sometime also illustration. The photo quality is good sometimes even great with high resolution too. For the illustration, they also provide the .eps file. It’s very convenient with the rss feed only for these free images, so I can check through my rss reader whether I want to download the image or not.
IStockphoto provides 4 – 5 free images a month (or one a week). We can choose the image resolution we want (the same step as if we want to buy). There’s also “Free Vector of the Month”, “Free Video of the Month”, “Free Track of the Month”, just check the page.
123RF provides a bunch of free images for a limited time, so there’s always new images. They only give away the “Blog Resolution” which is not more than 400px width. But I think it’s okay if you want to use it as an illustration for the blog post.
And if you don’t want to collect a lot of images and the thinking probably not gonna use them and need to spare the disk capacity for some other things, you can surf the long time favorite site stock.xchng and search just every time you need an image.

Before using those images, please make sure to read the license agreement. Even if the image is free for download, there’s always some limitation or obligation attached. If you want images with high quality for commercial use I think it will be wiser to buy the royalty.

Note:
This isn’t a promotional post, not a paid post and I’m not representing any of the brands above.