Creating a visual rich design for your website is really dependent upon adding pictures or illustrations. A web site without any type of media will feel a bit bland, unless amazing work has been done with typography and colors, which is rarely the case.
So, yeah you need pictures. No everybody has the talent of taking amazing pictures or the budget of hiring a professional photograph. Your option is then to use what we called stock photos; generic pictures of great quality for a low cost. Lots of site now offers stock photos, like IstockPhoto, ShutterStock, just to name those.
However, you might have a really tiny budget and those sites are now charging more and more for those great quality stock photos.
Fortunately, couple of sites have spruce up recently offering totally free stock photos, which for most part can be used in commercial project without any restrictions.
Here is a list of some of those sites:
- Unsplash: http://unsplash.com/ – great quality and updated weekly, landscape, travel, devices, people, etc ..
- Little Visuals: http://littlevisuals.co/ – decent quality, updated weekly, mostly landscape and abstract, textures.
- Death To The Stock Photo: http://join.deathtothestockphoto.com/ – Update via inbox, good quality, lots of people shots
- PicJumbo: http://picjumbo.com/ – really good quality, lots of devices shots and large aperture shots
- Picography: http://picography.co/ – good quality, mostly landscapes and travel shots
- Gratisography: http://www.gratisography.com/ – very good quality, some weird shots, artistic.
- Jay Mantri: http://jaymantri.com/ – good quality, lots of textures and city landscapes.
- Magdeleine: http://magdeleine.co/browse/ – excellent quality, mostly landscape
- MorgueFile: http://www.morguefile.com/archive – usually good quality, very wide range of subjects
- SplitShire: http://splitshire.com/ – really good quality, some models shots
- Super Famous Studios: http://superfamous.com/ – excellent quality, lots of landscape and texture.
- RaumRot: http://www.raumrot.com/ – Excellent quality, lots of subject types.
If you have other resources, please share in the comments and we will added to the list.
