Best Cheap (or Free) Stock Photography Sources for Your Website or Blog

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Jul 16, 2007

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High quality photography is one of the key elements that separates professionally designed websites from those that suffer from "the boss's nephew designed it" syndrome. But top notch stock photography from well-known sources like Corbis, Getty and Comstock can cost over $200 per photo. At that price, stock photography can quickly chew up a large chunk of your website design budget. To save money, some companies buy a digital camera and take a DIY approach to photography, which usually results in the obvious "you get what you pay for" look.

Before you power on your digital camera or download a single clipart object, checkout these online stock photo sources that we use to get unique, professional looking stock photos for a few bucks (US $) or less.

Stock.Xchng

This site offers completely free stock photos for use in web, print and multimedia production. The images are user contributed, so you will have to spend a fair amount of time hunting for the "perfect" image, but when budgets are tight, you can save money by checking here first for photos.

iStockPhoto

iStockPhoto is my favorite low-cost stock photo website. The site usability is superb, their photo quality and selection is terrific and most images suitable for web use are only $2.00. To buy photos, you purchase credits that you then exchange for photos; the minimum purchase is 10 credits for $12.00. The only drawback to their credit system is that credits do expire after one year from the purchase date. While writing this post, I saw that iStockPhoto has added video and Flash media, but I've not used or even browsed that content yet so I cannot comment on the quality or selection.

Stockxpert

Operated by the same folks that run Stock.Xchng, this site offers higher quality photos than Stock.Xchng, but you will have to pay for these photos. For only $1.00, you can get 800 x 600 pixel, 72 dpi photos that are suitable for web use, or for $10.00 you can get 300 dpi photos suitable for print use. Similar to iStockPhoto, Stockxpert uses a credit system for purchasing photos, but iStockPhoto's photo selection and quality is superior.

FotoSearch

If you've sifted through the thousands of photos on the first three sites and still cannot find that perfect photo, then try FotoSearch.com. This site catalogs over 2 million images from 100 different stock photography websites. You can narrow your search by image type, publisher, image dimensions, licensing type and even image orientation. If you can't find the photo you're seeking here, then it may not exist in the known universe.