Finding quality images and photos for complementing an important article, essay or news report is already a challenge for many. Imagine when the goal is not only to find good images, but also to find some that you could openly and freely use without needing to pay royalties or one-time publishing rights.
Nonetheless the task would seem, at first, a tough one to carry out; however, times are changing fast, and there were few and little-known online free image resources available until today. New ones are appearing and offering a great assortment of quality pictures, an alternative to the expensive ones at traditional stock image libraries.
But as long as your subjects do not require photos of art masterpieces stored in world museums, or faces of popular stars, you may be likely to find highly interesting visual alternatives by exploring the world of free and grassroots image clearinghouses.
It's never been a secret that I feel one of the best resources of grassroots free images online is the Stock Exchange at http://sxc.hu, It's an impressive collection of many high-quality photos taken by amateur photographers from around the world. As a matter of fact, you can be one of the many contributors to this outstanding and fast growing image clearinghouse.
The images displayed at the Stock Exchange are searchable in multiple ways and offer thumbnail views that are large enough to provide a good glimpse of what the shots contain (unlike other alternative image libraries that have reduced the size of these thumbnails too much, which makes it harder to appreciate the image's content without loading a larger version of it adding a lot of time to the overall searching process).
The Stock Exchange archives more than 100,000 images for which the photographers have established re-usage terms, leaving most of them available for immediate re-use.
But, it's difficult to access the Stock Exchange at times due to the increasing demand and the need to move everything to larger and more powerful servers. Until it settles down, this is the perfect time to look around and break out of the soothing and rewarding experience sxc.hu has been creating.
Mayang's Free Texures is a library of over 3000 textures from architecture, building, fabric, man-made items, metal, nature, plants, stone and wood. Images are high quality resolution at 1600x1200 or larger with most at 2560x1920.
All images are free for all uses except for selling and they appreciate credit. The site has a mailing list for those who wish to be notified when new textures are added.
The download limit is 20 textures per day. The site lets you know how many you've downloaded. Each image comes with a caption describing it. The aerial view of Paris and other locales are amazing. Not all images look like background pictures especially the autos collection. So don't let the term "texture" throw you off.
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