Friday, April 29, 2011

10 Best Sites For Finding Royalty Free Stock Photos

Royalty Free Stock Photos and images are one of the most important and valuable resource for a webmaster. “Free” in this context means “free of royalties (paying each time you use an image)”. It does not mean the image is free to use without purchasing a license or that the image is in the public domain.


In simpler terms, you have to buy these stock images and then you can use it multiple times (with some number limits). There is no time limit on when the buyer can use an image or no one can have exclusive rights of a Royalty-free image (the photographer can sell the image as many times as he or she wants).Here are the best sites for royalty free stock photos and images.


Flickr
Flickr certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Its a Yahoo product and its the best service you will get for sharing photos. The Creative Common Attribution License is very clear and you have many options to choose from. With 50+ team members Flickr is the most popular website on internet in terms of photo search.


You can find a large variety of Royalty-Free stock images. There terms and conditions are very easy to understand, so that you can ensure good quality images with no other worries about licensing.


Stock.XCHNG is under new management! Getty Images has acquired or own the world’s best free stock site. SXC has a long history and a great community.


iStockphotos has royalty-free stock photography, vector illustrations, stock video footage, audio tracks and Flash® files, which makes them a great option if you are a webmaster. The cost of all starts pretty low as $1 for photos. You can choose different image sizes according to your needs.


Fotolia is a worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images, allowing individuals and professionals to legally buy and share stock images and illustrations. Fotolia offers the largest image bank of free and affordable royalty free photos and illustrations perfect for any medium, web or print. Photographers and designers constantly update Fotolia with thousands of new photos and illustrations each day, while photographers and designers receive commission from each photo sold and revenue from advertising on the free section.


Some of our most popular stock photography collections are trend-researched, art-directed and shot by professional photographers, all in-house.


Royalty free photos and illustrations for websites, newspapers, magazines, video and TV productions, iPhone applications, PowerPoint presentations, forums, blogs and school work.


Its the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet (link back and attribution required). If you want it for off-line use then its not commercial you can download the web size images for free.



Professionally shot royalty-free photos, available by subscription. For one low price, you can download just the kind of stock images you need. Photos.com is a division of Getty Images.


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