Nonetheless the task would seem at first a tough one to carry out, times are fast changing, and to the few and little-known online free image resources available until today, news ones are appearing and offering a great assortment of alternative quality pictures to the expensive ones offered by 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, it may be likely that you can find highly interesting visual alternatives by exploring the world of free and grassroots image clearinghouses.
I have never made a secret that what I feel is one of the best resources of grassroots free images online is the Stock Exchange at http://sxc.hu, a truly impressive collection of many high-quality photos taken from non-professional amateur photographers from around the world. As a matter of fact you can be yourself 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 thumbnails view that are sufficiently large to provide a good glimpse of what the shots actually contain (some of the other alternative image libraries, have reduced too much the size of these thumbnails making much harder to appreciate the content of any image without first loading up an enlargement of it - with significant time added to the overall searching process).
The Stock Exchange archives today more than 100.000 images for which the photographers have established re-usage terms, leaving the great majority of them available for immediate re-use.
But, for a few days now the Stock Exchange has become inaccessible, due to the increasing demand and the forced need to move everything to new and more powerful servers. While it comes back, it is the perfect time to look around and break out of the soothing and rewarding experience sxc.hu has been creating.
Here are some interesting alternatives
