Photos are a great way to get inspiration for making a site’s design, or indeed including the images in your design itself of course! Here are 5 of my favourite sites that have royalty free Creative Commons, Public Domain, copyleft etc licensed images for you to use:
- YotoPhoto.com YotoPhoto is probably my favourite copyleft photo site - it indexes a wide range of sites (including some of the ones listed here but also Flickr and Wikipedia), but its search has a real killer feature for me: search by colour! Just pick the colour your looking for (e.g. to match your design), and it will show you a selection! Great stuff with a great range of photos.
- openphoto.net Recently redesigned with a prominent tag cloud, openphoto is a useful resource with some really nice quality photos. Great for idly browsing around the tags looking for ideas.
- moregueFile.com morgueFile offers the same sort of experience as openphoto.net, just without the tag cloud. morgueFile uses its own custom license for its images, but does allow personal and commercial use with some restrictions.
- stock.xchng stock.xchng is a really nice looking site with some really nice pictures to match. Well organised, with the original photographers each getting their own profile page. Unfortunately, stock.xchng requires you to register to download the originals.
- Stockvault I recently stumbled onto stockvualt the otherday. Its got a pretty nice looking site with some nice touches like hand picked “featured” images. However, the interface lets it down slightly - I don’t seem to be able to browse categories, and there doesn’t seem to be any license information included with the images other than calling them “Free”. Some really nice pictures though, and well worth a look.
Have fun!