Design and illustration activities often require the use of images. In that intent, photo agencies come to the rescue with their organized offer of catalogs, stocks, heaps of photographs sold for one or more uses. Unfortunately, not everybody have the financial wealth to purchase agency stock photos to illustrate a web site, a leaflet, or a small decorative item. If you do not have a top-of-the-heap requirement (agency photographs are of exceptional quality by definition) or if you do have the energy and time to dig a little deeper, there is the solution to buy from those photographers – often amateurs but not always – who decided to put some of their images in the public domain or under the Creative Commons license.
But the problem is still to find the images. Here comes a recently opened web site offering an image search engine targetting specifically those image types (freely available to all). Welcome to YotoPhoto.
you will still have to check the exact terms of the license contract requested by the author (and sometimes to verify that the model gave his/her agreement to the image use), but it will guide you on a fast path to many images. Quality is uneven to say the least (most photographers here are not professionals, many images come directly from Flickr), but the source is definitely interesting/useful and the glint of a jewel reveals itself to the trained eye.
The most common origin for the images you will find here is the group of the usual suspects:
- Flickr (where you will find a vast majority of amateur shots)
- Stock.Xchng
- Wikipedia (multi-language encyclopaedia containing much more than mere images)
- MorgueFile (whose content I really appreciate)
- freefoto.com
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