15 Best Places for Designers to Get Free Stock Photos Onlineمواقع لصور التصميم

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15
موقع مجاني لصور التصميم و الجرافيك
Dedicated free stock photo sites


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stock.xchng is all free, all the time. Their advanced search
is only basic by paid site standards, but hey, did I mention that the
service is free? They have over 350,000 images contributed by 30,000
photographers. The one downside to getting photos from stock.xchng is
that they’re quite well known, so designers may find that the smaller
subset of quality images on site are quite heavily used in many other
places, making it difficult to be original. Stock.xchng is a Hungarian
site and was founded in 2001.

one of the most popular paid stock photo sites – iStockphoto,
sponsors them. There’s a good selection of illustrations and vectors
for free on stock.xchng, which you just don’t get with the big free
sites.

Aimed at: Web designers and web developers, illustrators, print designers

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Their admirable goal is to provide stock photography for both
commercial and non-commercial use, for free. They give away their
collections with the hope that they are useful and enjoyed.

A small team of in-house professional photographers supplies the
photos in the site. After each upload, the color and image is sharpened
and they are keyword-tagged by professional photographers. This is a
great place to get high impact and good looking pictures, but the focus
is on quality, not quantity so the collection isn’t as big as other
sites.

Aimed at: all creatives, most pictures are reasonable resolution

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Morguefile is for creatives, by creatives.
It started in 1996 and is highly recommended by many web design and
development professionals. Morguefile currently contains 9,148 pages at
24 photos each page, and the photos are very good resolution. It’s
called "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]" in reference to the term used for a place to keep postproduction creative materials.

The photos are mostly great quality, and you can filter your results
by several characteristics, which is handy. Keyword tagging is
relatively basic, with between five and fifteen tags per photo, so use a
few terms to search. If you use a photo from Morguefile, you’re asked
to credit the photographer when possible. The site can be a bit slow to
load sometimes.

Aimed at: Illustrators, artists, designers, teachers and all other creative pursuits, according to the home page

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The name is certainly not misplaced as the pictures on the site are
quite polished, especially the illustrations. There are around 7,500
images on site currently.

The photos, although quite small in number, look good and have been
post processed by professionals. Each photo has an accompanying short
story, which can be quite handy, and certainly endearing! You can either
browse categories or use the very basic search facility.

Aimed at: Both [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and print designers (photo resolution is usually excellent)

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Free Media Goo has a memorable name for a not-so-memorable
site; it certainly has some good features, but is more a niche search
engine. The site was created by web developers for web developers, hence the presence of free Flash and audio as well as stock photos.

Alongside free stock photos, the site also has free textures, audio
and Flash movies. Unfortunately, the collection is tiny and many photos
are a bit amateurish.

Aimed at: Web designers and web developers, illustrators, print designers

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openphoto.net has been collecting free photos since 1998,
with contributors from all over the world. Many people use it is a
photoblog site, so you might find many Flickr-style personal shots.

Search is extremely simple (keyword only), but you do have the option
to browse categories to find images (which is probably the easiest
way). Keyword tagging is very basic on the site and in many cases, a
photo has only one tag. Unless your search is quite literal, you are
better off browsing the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Almost all photos have a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] license.

Aimed at: Web designers and developers – images are often too low resolution for many print jobs.

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Flickr is one of the largest online photo sharing sites on the web.
There’s an enormous mix of complete amateur pictures and professional
photographer images. The admin team at Flickr numbers almost 50, and the
site was recently purchased by Yahoo! so a great group of folks manages
it.

Use the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and check the ‘Creative Commons licensed’ box to find pictures that can
be used in your web design and development. The site has excellent
tagging so it’s quite easy to find images under the subject that you’re
interested.

Aimed at: web design and development professionals
because most of the photos featured on the site have too low of a
resolution for print design work

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A reasonable sized collection of quite good photos is available at
Stockvault. They have just over 16,000 stock photos from 4,000
photographers. All images are licensed under a Creative Commons
attribution license. The site began as the personal site of Bjorgvin
Gudmundsson in 2001.

Keyword tagging is quite basic, so explore the site with both the
search option and the categories. The resolution is what most ordinary
stock photo sites would call "small to medium". You can download
pictures, logo templates, clip art, textures and backgrounds without
signing up on the site. Stockvault has a nicer and friendlier user
interface than many stock photo sites.

Aimed at: mostly web designers

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Yes, this image site is ‘the’ NASA. All photos are space themed, but
the collection is large and the photos are very professional.

Keyword tagging is good and the resolution is invariably 640px x
480px, so they’re not ideal for print design. Many of the shots are
better as textures/repeating background than actual pictures. The size
of the collection is substantially increased by checking the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

Aimed at: People interested in space exploration, but useful for web designers looking for textures or space themed shots

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deviantART is a popular website for digital and traditional media artists to showcase their work. They have a great [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] on site. deviantART is a big site, with a big team and big ideas. The site is full of personality, as the name suggests.

The images are gorgeous, image resolution is enormous, you can
download without registering anywhere, oh, and did I mention that the
images are gorgeous?

Aimed at: Artists, print designers, and web designers.

Free stock photo search engine


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It was only a matter of time before someone found a way to aggregate
free stock photo results and monetize the concept somehow, and that’s
what Everystockphoto does. There are a huge number of pictures
indexed on this site, numbering in the millions. For example, there’s
over 67,000 results for the search term "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]".

You can search free stock photos from Morguefile, Freerange Stock,
Photoxpress, Flickr, stock.xchn, NASA, Wikimedia Commons and more, in a
single site. They have good sorting and filtering options to help you
find the perfect photo, but not heaps of search options, though. You may
be able to search all the different sites here, but you still have to
sign up for accounts on the site that hosts the image.

Aimed at: Web designers and web developers, illustrators, print designers

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The Creative Commons Search finds images through Google and
Yahoo, Flickr, Blip.tv, jamendo SpinExpress and Wikimedia Commons.
Probably the largest collection of free images in one place but beware,
some search results may not be Creative Commons so do your homework
before using a photo.

You can search for a single term across quite a few different media
quickly. You can refine your results by commercial use and modification
allowances. You have access to each site’s own search features
instantly, but have to log in to download the image in some cases.

Aimed at: Web designers and web developers, illustrators, print designers

Free areas in paid sites


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Dreamstime has one of the largest libraries of stock photos
on the net. At the time of writing, they have just under 7 million
images, and just under 80,000 contributing photographers. In order to
stand out among the huge crowd, Dreamstime photographers often put their
photos in the free section of the site. A search for [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], for example, yields 26 pages of 20 results each. The site has been online since 2000.

Most free photos require no attribution to the photographer in your
design. Photos at Dreamstime remain on the site indefinitely.
Unfortunately, you can only search photos by keyword; there are no
advanced search filters like orientation, color or model options, etc.

Aimed at: Web and print designers

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Fotolia is one of the oldest stock photo sites on the net.
Their free section is quite good, but changes every day and the free
photos that were there yesterday, may not be there the next. Fotolia has
an office in France and their global headquarters in New York.

They offer ten to twenty free photos every day. If you have the time
to download and tag all of them every day, you could build quite a
library of photos. You won’t find isolated shots, and photos are
frequently just a tiny bit lower quality than you’d pay for.

Aimed at: Fotolia in general has photos, illustrations, vectors and videos for download for many digital media professions

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iStockphoto is one of the most popular stock photo sites on
the net, with excellent quality photos that are often Photoshop’ed to
within an inch of their lives already (which is either a good or bad
thing). iStockphoto has a responsive helpdesk and a comprehensive [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

They only offer one free image a week, but it is always high quality.
Free images from the last three weeks are kept available for download.
Similar to Fotolia, you’ll have to make it a habit to download and tag
these photos yourself so you can search them on your own computer.

Aimed at: Web designers and web developers, illustrators, print designers


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