Free Photos and Illustrations

The most common search on Google for stock photos is "free stock photos" or any combination of "free (topic) stock photo". Below is a list of sites that actually have good images available for free. There is an endless list of free images sites, but most have so many bad images that finding something useful take a lot of time and you often still don't end up with a great image. However, the list below are places where you can find pretty good images, although most of them are still trying to get you to buy an affordable stock photo as well.

123RF offers a rotating collection of really good stock images. We call the photos and illustrations rotating because each image is only left on the free list for a period of time. If you see and image you might want to use, you should download it quickly before it disappears. 123Rf offers no searching abilities of the images in this area.

iStockPhoto offers 2-3 premium free images all of the time. This photos (and sometimes vectors) are excellent quality, and only last for a short time. Look for Free Photo of the week on their homepage. They also offer a free illustration, video file and audo click every week. These are normally very high quality, but they have very few offereed for free.

Dreamstime has a huge section of free images, but most of these are sub-quality. The benefit over other free image collections is that it is searchable. They are also nice enough to show you related images from their paid collection in an attempt to get you to "upgrade". I often started looking for a free image and have ended up paying the $3-5 for a worthy replacement, because it was much better.

Cutcaster has about  3000 free images in their free image section. Similar to Dreamstime, this images are great. Unlike Dreamstime'ss free image section, Cutcaster doesn't have any search abilities for users in this area.

Note: Some agencies have a different license for the use of their free images than the standard license provided for most of their royalty-free photos. You should look at the license to make sure your use is allowed. One of the common changes is a reduction in the number of allowed prints to a fraction of what the standard license allows.