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Picture this
August 10th, 2007 by John BrianOnce upon a time, getting photos for your site was an ordeal. It involved combing through massive stacks of CDs that cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, and required you to buy them all even if you just needed a few. Recent innovations have made it significantly easier to get stock photos for free or cheap (and I don’t mean using Google Image Search and hoping no one notices!)
YotoPhoto is my personal favorite. It’s not a library but an index of 
other free libraries, none of which are big enough to search on their own but the sum of which make for a pretty good collection. Their mission is
[...]to help people locate, remix and republish open and copyleft images. We aren’t just about ‘free stock photos’ for designers, but also about helping educators, bloggers and digital artists find photos they can use without fear of “the man”.
Yotophoto draws heavily from Flickr photos that are tagged as Creative Commons, as well as Wikipedia’s photo division. An overall great place to find photos.
I just discovered the second service today via Lifehacker: Free Range Stock Photos. Free 
Range has a library contributed by photographers who receive ad revenue sharing. It requires a registration, which will conveniently sign you up for their newsletter - for those who have an objection to sharing your email address, you can try a login on BugMeNot or just use a Mailinator address. The search still needs work - I typed in “cat” and it gave me a bunch of construction equipment, while “city” gave me a light bulb.
If you’re willing to pay a little money, consider iStockPhoto for your design needs. They’ve got a volumous library of photos (and 
now video) you can use for $1 to $50 (depending on the resolution, not the subject). The biggest catch here is that they’ve become a popular go-to place for stock photos, so your selection might have already been used by others in your sector!
Of course, the best way to get a free original photo is to take it yourself or to utilize your existing assets. Do you have field offices that do a majority of your actual mission? Make sure they’re set up with a digital camera and a way to get these photos to you. You can set up Flickr and YouTube accounts fairly quickly, allowing remote offices to get you the shots you need without having to wait for the mail, which lets you give notes on them immediately if you need them to try again.
And once you do have internal photos, make sure you figure out a solid way to categorize them and search for them. What you can keep in your head right now could become a major nightmare in ten years when your replacement’s replacement is looking for that one photo you used in a montage… all anyone remembers is that it’s in the folder marked, “Pictures.”
Where do you get your free or cheap photos? How do you manage your house photo library? Share your sources in the comments.
