Web and Graphic Design HQ

We have lots of royalty free stock sites we go to… here are two of my favorites, and they both contain bucketloads of free stock photography images:

1. Stock.Xchng: www.sxc.hu — billed as “the leading free stock photography website”
2. morgueFile: www.morguefile.com — contains high resolution digital free stock photography for either corporate or public use.

Unlike traditional stock photo companies, there are now a lot more free stock image sites (making their money from advertising, referrals to other sites and web traffic) and low-cost royalty free stock photo websites (selling images with either subscriptions or credits, often purchased for around $1 per credit). We’ll review more of these in future so you can understand the differences.

The two here are royalty free, but also, the images are free to download — you don’t need to buy a subscription or credits. With stock.xchng, you register for free, and with morgueFile, you don’t even have to do that.

With stock.xchng, in their words, “whether you just want to browse our huge image gallery or want to share your personal photos with others, this is the free stock photography site for you!” I post images to this site, although there’s only four on there so far (downloaded more than 2,000 times!).

On stock.xchng, there’s quite a variety of free stock images from around the world, and most give you permission to use them however you like (with some basic restrictions). A small percentage want written permission first before downloading: I’ve never bothered to ask, I just use the majority of images that don’t have this usage restriction.

For instance, I needed a photo of the Danube River in Budapest today, for a travel flyer, and within 5 minutes had a suitable pic to use.

Easy to search, and to browse by category or keyword. In your advanced search, you can even specify a minimum image size, as well as restrictions on usage.

Hint: in your results, there’ll be a little “dot” under the photo, to the left of the name (circled in red below).

The dots tell you the usage restriction:

1. White dot: standard restrictions apply: basically about using the picture nicely, not putting it on porn sites and not selling them.
2. Light-grey dot: User must be notified upon use. You don’t have to ask permission, or wait for a reply.
3. Dark-grey dot: User must be notified and credited upon use. Like light-grey, except adding a credit.
4. Black dot (not shown above): Written permission needed from the user

If you don’t want to see black dots in your results, use an Advanced Search and choose “partly” for the “Restricted OK” option. I don’t really both with these: mainly because I cannot afford to wait for a reply, which might take days.

Morgue File — where does the name come from? It mentions it on the site:

“The term “morgue file” is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats. Although the term has been used by illustrators, comic book artist, designers and teachers as well. The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for use in all creative pursuits. This is the world wide web’s morguefile.”

Although the thumbnails are small, some of the files here are of excellent quality and a huge range. Each search result is quite detailed about the file size, as well as stats on downloads and views. You can also view the keywords and EXIF data (although you click to see this info, it isn’t displayed by default).

Between these two free stock photography sites, we often find we don’t need to use the credits we have at the paid, low-cost stock photography sites that we use.

More about those sites in another post!