Where To Get Stock Photos For Your Projects

Posted by Jon Norris on June 06, 2010 in Creative, Design, Resources tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m sure you’ve all been there. You’re working on some design project: maybe a postcard for a new church program, a background for your pastor’s Powerpoint slides, some addition to your website, or even a blog post. Your project isn’t quite right. It needs something. The perfect image or background or texture would make it 1000 times better. But where can you find something to use?

I started out my design career in a really big corporation. It was one of those places where the SVP of Marketing would laugh if you suggested using an image in an ad or on a brochure that didn’t cost at least a couple thousand dollars. In one of the most extreme situations, my boss at the time demanded that I use a lame illustration in a full-page ad for a national publication. It was something so simple that I could have easily created something much better in about an hour. However, in my boss’s eyes, there was no way that anything could be better than that lame stock image. The bad part? It was rights-protected. How much did it cost to use it in that single ad? $8,000. That’s right. Eight. Thousand. Dollars. I think a little piece of me died that day.

Anyway, outside of the corporate cubicle farm, I’m willing to bet that most of us don’t have the kind of cash laying around that we can afford to spend much (if anything) on stock images, yet we still need them to do our jobs. Where can you find good stock art on the cheap? Here are a few of my favorites:

iStockphoto.com

For client work, I typically start my search for stock images at iStockphoto.com. At the moment, they have nearly 7 million royalty-free stock images available, so there’s a good chance you can find whatever you need. Yes, they even have a photo of a luchador using an abacus, and yes, I’ve actually used this image in a project (because it’s nothing less than awesome).

They sell photos, illustrations, and even video and audio. That’s right: I said sell. Depending on the resolution you need, images can range anywhere from $1 up to $24 (although video is a bit pricier). In most cases, that cost is small potatoes when you’re talking about paid client work. Even for work that I do for my church, it’s worth it to me to pay a few bucks for a great photo and save hours digging through other sites for something that may or may not be what I need. iStockphoto has been a lifesaver more than once.

One of the most awesome things about their site is that you can search images by color palette, shape (square, landscape or portrait orientation) and where whitespace is located (in case you want to put copy on the left, right, top, bottom, middle, etc.). And yes, it really works. To me, their search is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a stock photo site.

stock.xchng

My next go-to site for great stock photos is stock.xchange (take note of their wacky URL — sxc.hu). They have a great inventory of photos as well: roughly 400,000. That’s nowhere near the quantity of iStockphoto, but their quality is pretty solid. The best part? The images are FREE. The catch? Be sure to check the availability and terms of use of each image. Some of them can be used however you want. Others however require that you notify the original photographer of where you’re using them. Still others require that you give credit or attribution to the photographer when using the image in public work.

Their search is pretty good as well, although they do try to upsell you on “premium” (that’s the secret code word for paid) images from iStockphoto.com

MorgueFile.com

After stock.xchange, I typically head to MorgueFile. It is an archive of photos created by designers and photographers. Like stock.xchange, these images are free. Unlike stock.xchange, you don’t have to worry about licensing issues or attribution, although some photographers still request that you notify them of use.

MorgueFile has some great quality, but to me, the weak point is the search capabilities. Last week, I made the mistake of searching for “A-Team” for a project I was working on. On iStockphoto, there were two results: a piece of duct tape and an old blue van that looked similar to the one Mr. T’s character drove in the original TV series. On stock.xchange, I was presented with a lot more photos, but most of them were sports related (because of the “team” in my search terms). On MorgueFile, the results were strange. It asked me if I meant “ATM”. Ok, I’ll give you that. But instead of showing me pics of ATMs, it showed me sports pics like stock.xchange had done. Weird.

LostAndTaken.com

Sometimes, you just need a really great texture to serve as a background for a block of text, for a Powerpoint slide, or for song lyrics on screen. Lost And Taken has a huge collection of really great texture photos. The quality is incredible, and once again, these are free to use. Licensing isn’t an issue, and you don’t have to worry about attribution. This is a really great resource. It isn’t updated very often, but that’s certainly understandable since there’s only one contributor, and he’s just trying to give back to the design community in the spare time he has available.

BittBox.com

BittBox is another personal favorite of mine when I need textures. On top of providing great photos of textures for download, the site also has some of the best Photoshop brushes I’ve seen for creating your own textures and backgrounds. Like most of the previous sites, images from BittBox are free for use and don’t require attribution. BittBox is updated about once a week, but again, you’ll get no complaints from me because it’s such a wonderful resource with a wealth of images, all contributed by one person.

Flickr.com

Finally, I’m going to mention Flickr. Yes, there are millions of pictures there, and no, you can’t use most of them. However, there are two groups of photos you can use in your projects. The first is photos that have a Creative Commons license. To find them, go to the Advanced Search. All the way down at the bottom of that form, you can check a box to search only Creative Commons content, including work you can use commercially. Here’s the tricky part: each image may have different license terms for usage. Some are totally free to grab and use. Others require asking for permission or giving the author credit. Still others have other terms — things like “no derivative works”, which means you must use the image as-is and can’t alter or build upon the image. You’ll see Creative Commons license terms in the Additional Information section of the sidebar on any given image’s page.

The other Flickr pics that you can use in your work are those from the Library of Congress’ photostream. They are typically old photos that are in the public domain and have no known copyright restrictions. There are about 9,000 photos there, and some of them are real gems.

In Conclusion

This certainly isn’t a complete list of sources for stock photography, but hopefully it will point you in the right direction and give you a few new resources that you hadn’t thought about in the past.


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