Weblog of A Designer

STOCK.XCHNG
http://www.sxc.hu

STOCK.XCHNG is one of the leading FREE stock photo sites that allows users to browse a huge image gallery containing 350000+ high-quality stock photographs, permits sharing of personal photos and hosts more than 25000 photographers from across the world. The site also features a very active and useful forum on photography and stock images.

While most of the images are free for download and personal use, there are many photographs distributed under hundreds of categories that are free for commercial use. Though users are encouraged to upload their images on this enormous pool of stock photographs, however one needs to be extra sure about the visual clarity and aestheticity of the images. Unless the photo represents excellent creative and technical skills, it is hard to get selected in the pool. The quality ranking process of the images and their respective ratings ensures the visual, creative and aesthetic qualities of the stock-pool.

STOCK.XCHNG also runs STOCKXPERT (www.stockxpert.com), an online shop that allows users to buy and/or sell high-quality stock photos photo at a great price!

MORGUEFILE
http://www.morguefile.com

MORGUEFILE is an archive to store post-production material for reference, an inactive job file, as the term is explained on the home page of the site. MORGUEFILE contains hundreds of free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

The website says, “The term morgue file is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats, although the term has been used by illustrators, comic book artist, designers and teachers, as well.” The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for use in all creative pursuits. MORGUEFILE is the world wide web’s morguefile repository.

MORGUEFILE allows the users to browse and download large stock photographs for personal as well commercial use. It also allows the users to contribute images to the site’s stock photograph pools. Registered users can access lightbox, create their online portfolio and submit photos. Once submitted pictures are approved by the editors/admin, the user is considered as a contributor. After the user is verified as a contributor, his/her account will forever remain within the archive of Morguefile.com as <username>@morguefile.com and the user will be given an access to this mail account as well as few other additional features at http://www.morguefile.com/horde.

Recently, MORGUEFILE has launched Morguefiles Shop (http://morguefile.com/store/index.php), with collaboration with Amazon.com, which enables their users to buy cameras, prints and other photgraphy related stuff in a secured and safe manner.

OPEN STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY
http://www.openstockphotography.org

OPEN STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY (beta) is mashup created to help designers find free stock photography (or public domain photography). Much like Wikipedia (and Wikimedia Commons), Open Stock Photography, is a multilingual system and allows the users to search for stock photography in virtually any language!

The Wikimedia Commons, a central media archive operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, contains more than 2,402,261 images, uploaded by over 30,000 registered users. Each of these files is available under a free content license or in the public domain; there are no restrictions of use beyond those relating to use of official insignia. Licenses which limit commercial use are considered non-free. The website OPEN STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY enables its users to search, browse, view, and download these images and also encourages photographers to submit their photographs to this unique pool of free stock images.

This site offers various features and functionalities that enables the users to browse, search or download images in a more effective manner, like Search (by term, tags or colors), light-boxing, implicit tagging, search translation, Public or private image commenting, and many more. Apart from these online functionalities, OPEN STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY also offers few exclusive off-site features like, image resizing, image cropping and image printing.

STOCKVAULT
http://www.stockvault.net

STOCKVAULT is a photo sharing site that enables its users to browse and search their photo gallery of over 8.000 royalty-free, high resolution stock photos, templates and logos to use in personal and educational design projects. Users can also share their own photos and participate in the revenue sharing program.

The users can register themselves on the site as members and access the photos, lightbox and other features. Once registered as member, the user can sign up for a photographer’s account. On activation of the photographers’ account, users will be allowed to share their images with other members. STOCKVAULT is a photo sharing site and does not allow the users to sell their photos, but it does offer a unique revenue sharing program, powered by Google AdSense, to the photographers. STOCKVAULT also organizes online photography contests quite often.

Apart from a huge gallery with over 8000 stock photos, STOCKVAULT also offers a section dedicated to various tutorials related to photography, photo editing, HTML and CSS. They run a separate site with various Photoshop, CSS and Dreamweaver related tutorials at http://www.tutorialvault.net. They have two other sites featuring stock templates and stock textures, available respectively at following locations - http://www.templatesfeed.com and http://www.texturepacks.net.

STOCKVAULT also has a very useful link section that features multiple websites offering free stock photos, images and other graphics.

AMAZINGTEXTURES
http://amazingtextures.com/textures
[Please Note: The site available at http://amazingtextures.com, does not seem to work properly, but http://amazingtextures.com/textures runs perfectly fine]

As the name suggests, AMAZINGTEXTURES is a site that provides hundreds of free, high-resolution textures, images, backgrounds, wallpapers and texture maps for personal use. All images are intuitively categorized in 19 separate categories for the users to search them easily. The site also has a separate section especially built for Tiled Textures.

One can visit the “Free Sample” section to access larger images without being registration. The users need to register to download high-res files and to get access to their Lightbox feature. Lightbox enables the users to gather up to 10 textures and download them at once, as a zipped file. The registered users are also allowed and encouraged to contribute textures to this pool. If user uploads 10 high-resolution textures in 15 selected categories and/or 3D image textures, the user can get “Full Access” to the site.

To use these textures for commercial purpose one needs to contact AMAZINGTEXTURES. Please do not forget to read their Terms of Use and Disclaimer before using any images from AMAZINGTEXTURES.

ALTERED STOCKS
http://alteredstocks.blogspot.com

ALTERED STOCKS is an archive of free stock images, conceptualized, developed and being maintained by Altered Black - the one-stop creative design agency providing business-intelligent design solution for your organization and your brand.

Altered Black, as a part of their endless effort to distribute and disseminate design assets and design knowledge among designers and design-users of the world, proudly presents - ALTERED STOCKS [alteredstocks.blogspot.com], a manually updated archive of high-resolution, large stock photos and images. Anyone can download these free images and use them for personal or professional, non-profit or commercial usages.

Though, ALTERED STOCKS currently offers only high-resolution stock photographs, however other design assets like icons, illustrations and graphics will be made available soon .