Top 10 Places to Find FREE Images Online
>> Tuesday, November 2, 2010
This is a guest post by Tanya of Blogelina as part of her Blog Tour. Check out her blog and find out how you can win $100 by following the Blogelina blog tour!
Whether you’re a blogger, a website designer, a homeschooling mom, a crafter – you name it - having access to great images can make your life easier and even more fun! If you aren’t a graphic designer, finding quality images to use can become expensive quickly.
What are some uses for online images?
- Easily create your own teaching materials for your children
- Add interest to your blog posts
- Find images to decorate your family newsletters or cards
- Make your to-do lists a little more fun to look at
- Keep the list going – tell us your ideas in the comments below!
Because different people have different needs, you will find sources for both free photos and free clipart images in the list below.
10 Free Image Sources
Microsoft Images – I was surprised and excited to come across this resource recently. In my searches for free image resources, most of them only provide photos. Microsoft Images gives you access to both photos and illustrations.
Flickr Creative Commons – If you search to find the resource a lot of people are using to get their free images, you’ll probably find them talking about the Flickr Creative
Commons. Here you’ll find thousands of images to use as long as you are using them for
personal use only or you’re willing to credit the image creator with their work.
Stock Exchange – With a database of almost 400,000 free images, you’re probably going to be able to find what you’re looking for at this site. One of the most popular free image sites, it’s easy to navigate and organize what you find.
WikiMedia Commons – Here you will not only find free images to use but free videos, free sounds, and other forms of free media.
Every Stock Photo – If you become a member of this site (membership is free), you will be able to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos. This feature will help you save a lot of time as you’ll be able to easily return to photos that you find but want to save for possible future use.
FreeImages.co – Based out of the UK, this site not only offers an index of free images, they also offer free ideas and tips for using your images.
PicFindr – This site allows you to search several stock image and photo community sites simultaneously. Your search results are broken down into categories based on which sites they came from. A few of the sites displayed may charge for their images but the results return many free images, as well.
Open Clipart Library – If you prefer to use clipart images over photos, this site offers a large library of illustrations. The site is easy to navigate and the download process is very simple.
Burning Well – The library of free images here is made up of images donated from photographers all over the world. You can easily search for photos by keyword, by category, or by popular choices.
Free Digital Photos – Here you can download images for free at their basic level. What I like about this site is that, if you find an image that you particularly like and might want to use for larger projects, you can easily purchase the larger version for a reasonable fee.
You may also like to read my Green Scrapbooking Tips.
4 comments:
As a blogger, I'm always on the hunt for good, free images and I never know where to start. This is a great resource, thanks for posting!!
Kristin
Born 2 Be Mom
Going to bookmark this list! Thanks.
One of my favorite sites for free photos is Dreamstime. It's a stock site, but they also have a huge free images directory that's very easy to search.
Another one that's good is Fotolia. (I had to giggle that the photo you use is from Fotolia, but there's not a link to them listed.)
I don't know how much interest this would garner, but I think it would be fun to have a photo swap blog party. I may just have to give it a try!
www.honeyandcheese.com
honeyandcheese{at}gmail{dot}com
Rebekah, the photo shown here was taken from the home page of the Microsoft Office Images directory (which doesn't require that you give them credit for the photos) - perhaps these sites share photos even among themselves...
I love Dreamstime, too, and have bought all of my stock images from them.
Great idea with the photo party! It's always fun to see new images.
Thanks for commenting!
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