Even if you don’t consider yourself a blogger, chances are no matter what home business you’re working – you should be blogging. Using images with blog posts helps a reader cue-in to what the subject is. If someone is just skimming along your site, the image will catch them before any text, so it’s a great idea to include an image with each blog post.
The key is to do this legally. Sure, you can search Google images and put up any picture you find, but the fact of the matter is that 9 out of 10 times you do this, you’re breaking the law as you don’t have the right to use someone else’s intellectual property without permission.
I’ve put together a list of 10 royalty free stock photography sites where you can find images to use with posts on your blog. All of these sites offer images submitted by users that have leaniant, royalty free licences allowing you to use the images you find for many reasons, including posting on your blog.
Stock.XCHNG is a stock photography site that I’ve used for a long time, and it continues to be my favorite. Many royalty free images to choose from — maybe the largest you’ll find anywhere.
Another one of the largest royalty free image galleries you’ll find, the Morgue File is quite impressive with a deep library of stock photography for creative people to use.
Stock Vault is a very well designed site for photographers and designers who can share their photographs with each other.
A nice royalty free photography site which, as far as I can tell, only requires attribution when you use a photograph.
The search engine of the bunch, Every Stock Photo searches across many royalty free stock photography sites to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.
A nice, simple site with some quality stock images for you.
This is a pretty well designed site that doesn’t yet have the quantity as the other big guys, but there are some good quality photographs here.
This one is fun – a collection of images scanned from old public domain books. Some interesting images in here for sure!
Yale’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Another fun one, this is a database of public domain historical images. Make sure you click around a bit, it’s not always easy to get right to an image you want!
This is a well designed stock photography site that lacks a large amount of images, but if you can get past that, it has potential.
If you’re looking for a low-cost method to always find the image you need, no matter what the occaision, check out iStockPhoto.com. iStock is the web’s original community-driven royalty free image site.
Is there any site that you can’t believe isn’t on this list? Let me know in the comments, and come back again soon!
