4 Useful Free Stockphoto Websites

Unfortunately not all projects have multi-thousand dollar budgets devoted just to original photography. Sometimes the budget doesn't even amount to double-digits. It's just plain nonexistent. What's a designer to do?

Enter free stock photography. Thousands of royalty-free images with no or low-restrictions on use are your new best friend. The traditional problem with free stock photography is some of the quality is not so great. Thankfully, this has begun to turn around in the past few years. Here's a look at some of my favorite resources and tools.

FreeRangeStock.com
Free Range Stock has access to thousands of in-house free stock photos and user-submitted photos. A big plus of this site is all the photos are at least 2400x1600, perfect to use in YouTube or Google+ cover photos, where the artwork needs to be enormous. You do need to sign up for an account to be able to download, but it's free and quick.

Pixabay.com
Pixabay has access to almost 100,000 high-quality images. No registration is required, but you can follow and message photographers if you do sign up. Lots of really great nature and landscape photos. They also have a WordPress plugin.

Unsplash.com
Unsplash is an interesting Tumblr-based project. 10 new photos are released each week and you can do absolutely whatever you'd like with them. These photos are generally a little more visually interesting than the majority of stock photos, but with that comes a bit more of a limited project-use.

PhotoDropper
PhotoDropper is a WordPress plugin linked up to the over 243 million Creative Commons photos on Flickr. I've been able to find photos related to many obscure topics. Tip: Even if your site or project isn't built on WordPress, you can still load it into a WordPress based site and search for images. Just click "View on Flickr" to download directly from Flickr.

What are some of your favorite ways to find free images for your projects?