Free Photo Sites
Are you writing and need a perfect picture for your post? Do you need a special picture and don't have one in your personal repertoire? Here is a short list of sites that offer free use of their photos. You must make sure however, that you are not getting sucked into the ads that take you to OTHER sites and make you pay for them. You will know which ones these are because they will have a transparent "X" across the photo, and it will have a 'price menu' on the right side of the photo. Generally, if it says STOCK, there will be a charge. "Free Stock Images" are NOT FREE. Go figure. They all have their strengths, but I have three current personal favorites:
PhotoBucket and Morguefile.
Both of these allow you to enter a word in their easy to see SEARCH button, and you can look for pictures easily without having to sift thru a lot of advertising. It is also very easy to contribute your own photos to these sites. They have a HUGE selection of pictures, and you can usually find something quickly, download it easily, and be done with it.
Stock Vault is a FANTASTIC site to find photos. They have a lot of really nice photos and a nice search feature. Just make sure that when you do a SEARCH for a word that you are not using one of the five photos that appear across the top of the landing page. Anytime it says Dreamstime, the photos are NOT FREE. So just look below the top row of photos, and you should be able to come up with some pretty nice-quality free photos.
This just in ~ ANOTHER FANTASTIC SITE
Jill Sackler just mentioned Flickr's Creative Commons. It's FANTASTIC! Just go to the site and type in your search word. VOILA! This one is a great resource, and all of them on Creative Commons are free ~ donated by users of Flickr. Love this one.
Other available sites include:
PhotosBank ~ To get to the free pictures on this site, go to the bottom of their home page (all the rest is paid or advertising) and enter the word(s) that you want to search for in the Search for Photos space. When it takes you to the results for your word, the top third of the landing page is all paid photos and advertising. You ONLY want the ones in the center of the page (three across ~ unless you want to pay for some) and you are given several options on how to retrieve the free ones to your computer.
Open Photo ~ Any of the SEARCH features on this site will take you to paid photos. It has a limited search capability. You are given CATEGORIES in which to search, and they have some good photos from which to choose. One of the things that I don't particularly like about this site is that the free photos that you choose have the photographers name in the lower left corner when you upload it. It is not obtrusive at all, but my (sometimes) OCD does not particularly like that.
Turbo Photo ~ All of the SEARCH features, again, take you to paid sites for photos. You are given CATEGORIES. If you go to the Categories, you will have to sift thru more categories, and then you will be given pictures that match the sub-categories. On this site, if it says SEARCH in any location, it will take you to paid photos, so just stay in the Categories.
Free Digital Photos is NOT FREE. I could not find anywhere that they offered free photos, and if it's that difficult, I don't want to bother with them.
Hope this helps, and happy blogging. PLEASE feel free to add any you may know of in the comment section and I will add them in the body. And if you are liking what you are reading, be sure to SUBSCRIBE to Mimi's Musings.
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