Professional photographers don’t like the growing trend of low and no cost stock photography available on the Internet, although this is really just a continuation of the mid-90’s move to relatively inexpensive royalty free stock photography offered in CD collections.

See, photographers who offered their works either on contract photo shoots or through rights managed sources used to see their photos being valued in the thousands of dollars; with low (often just a few dollars for print-quality files) and no cost options available, those rights managed pictures don’t look so attractive. I’m sympathetic to the plight of the photographer, but when a client asks me to source a photo and isn’t comfortable with the rights management limitations and high costs, I’m going to do what I can to make them happy. More often than not that means first perusing a handful of sites to see if there is a good quality image available cheap.

So, if you are looking for images to use in your own projects (whether it’s for your site or for press), these are a few places to look for images that might fit your needs.

1. Stock.XCHNG.
   The quality of the photos on this site are wildly variable. Some of the stuff isn’t particularly good, some of it is surprisingly useful, and all of it is free. Most of the images are released with no usage restrictions at all, while some have artist notification and/or approval requirements. If your needs are pretty limited, this is a good place to start. The site is often slow--burdened, no doubt, under the weight of thousands of freeloaders.
2. Dreamstime.com.
   Registered users can download 7 free images per week from a limited selection of donated images. Other downloads are extremely inexpensive and the selection and quality are both very good. Users purchase packages of credits ($20 and up) and then use those credits to purchase photos that cost just a few credits--the actual cost of each credit is a variable dependent on how many credits you pre-purchase. The site also offers various license extensions up to purchasing all rights to a photo (although the cost goes up dramatically for these options).
3. Fotolia.com.
   One of the best of the bunch, Fotolia.com’s photos cost $1 and up. There is a free section that offers a few images per day, but it is the quality and breadth of the rest of the site that is so impressive. The site is responsive and reasonably well sorted. The site also allows designers to download comp images for presentation to clients before purchase. Nice.
4. iStockphoto.com.
   The best of the bunch, in my opinion, is iStockphoto. Not only can you purchase reasonably priced, high quality images, but you can also find vector-based illustrations and short movie clips for use in multimedia projects. The prices range from $1 to $15 for images and from $5 to $50 for the movie clips. Every week, a new free photo is offered, but it would be pure luck if that photo happened to be useful in a current project. Still, the photos here are top notch, the lightbox tool is better sorted than Fotolia’s, and the designer spotlight is a place to go for inspiration. The costs, while higher than the others on the list, are still cheap in comparison to purchasing rights managed and the quality is high.

The danger, of course, is that you might see “your” photo on someone else’s ad or Web site. The $1100 rights managed image I used on a recent media kit isn’t something I’m likely to run into again any time in the near future. Like every choice a designer makes, there is a balance between the key points of affordability, quality, and uniqueness. For my smaller clients, of course, it’s always affordability that takes top honors.

A few times, I’ve had people send emails asking where they can get low or no cost images, though, and this is my answer. All of these sites have been useful to me at one time; I’m betting that all of them will come in handy again in the future. Your mileage may vary.