My Favorite Sites for Free Photos and Graphics

In an earlier article, "How to Illustrate Your AC Article -- Legally!" I wrote about some of the principles involved in making sure that you have a legal right to use the illustrations you've found for your AC articles. Now, I'd like to share with you some of my favorite sites for finding legal and free photographs and artwork.

1. www.sxc.hu This is Stock.xchng, a great favorite among Associate Content producers. You simply can't beat this website for great photos on a variety of topics. It has a great browse feature, a great search feature, and thousands of terrific photos. You do need to keep your eyes open, however, to make sure that you haven't accidentally selected one of their premium photos (which are not available for free use, and which will have a watermark on them). Their premium photos are usually shown in the bottom line or two of photos on the page. (If you accidentally click on one of the premium photos, you will find yourself on the Stockxpert site, so make sure you find your way back to Stock.xchng.)

2. www.yotophoto.com Yotophoto is another good free stock photo website. This also has a good search feature; you can even search by color!

3. www.geekphilosopher.com GeekPhilosopher has good photos, and an easy-to-use index. You'll also find links to a lot of other free stock photo websites here.

4. www.morguefile.com MorgueFile apparently has a lot of photos, and any subject I've searched on has had pretty successful results. The only thing I don't like about this site is that it has no index or browse feature, so you need to know exactly what you're looking for. (Some of the other sites are also good for browsing around and looking for ideas of things to write about -- not so with MorgueFile.)

5. www.bigfoto.com Bigfoto has some excellent pictures, but a limited number of subjects. Most of them are geographical.