A Few More Free Stock Image Sources for Your Hubs and Blogs

As the cliché goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words". While a stock photo may not be always appropriate, having a picture would instantly draw eyeballs, and that may lead to your hub getting views over ones that do not have a picture.

However, pictures belong to their photographers / artists, and you can't just use them because they are on the Internet somewhere. That is a violation of their copyright, and may subject you to suspension and/or deletion of your hub, and possibly civil lawsuits.

Here are a couple sources that provides FREE photos for your hubs and blogs, plus one that you may not have considered.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net is a great little website that has the typical "stock image" feel, and quite a bit of stock available for free. The low resolution version (typically only 300 pixels wide) is free, and has no watermark. They only request you link to them, and sign up on their mailing list. You don't even need to register. The higher res versions cost money, but you don't need those. All they need is a backlink and/or attribution.

Simple keywords usually yielded several results, and usually on topic. The "free" picture above is from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

Watermarked? -- No
Registration? -- No
Attribution? -- Yes

DreamsTime.com has both a paid and free section, and the free section search, while comprehensive, is also very keyword limited and thus brought up a lot of extraneous results. For example, searching for "Free" brought up "hands-free", "freestyle snowboarding", and so on. It also requires registration for free before you are allowed to download anything, and subsequent searches brings up a popup urging you to register.

http://www.dreamstime.com/free-photos

Watermarked? -- No
Registration? -- Yes
Attribution? -- Yes

StockFreeImages.com is also operated by DreamsTime, but has a different library somehow, claim to be over 670,000 images available. Again, keyword search brings up a lot of word related but not quite subject related results. As with DreamsTime.com, registration is required. However, this website gives you the full-sized image for free, not the low-res version, so that's a plus if you need it for print, not merely hub / blog.

http://www.stockfreeimages.com/

Watermarked? -- No
Registration? -- Yes
Attribution? -- Yes

StockVault.net only claims to have less than 33K free images indexed for search, and it requires registration. Searching by keyword is limited and there's plenty of "premium search results" that they seem to expect you to click on . The actual results are all over the place, most of which are completely irrelevant.

http://www.stockvault.net/

Watermarked? -- No
Registration? -- Yes
Attribution? -- Yes

Foter is a creative commons search engine that claims to have over 190 million images indexed, all free to use. Sources seem to be mostly Flickr. However, as most free images are not keyword marked, finding anything relevant will be next to impossible without a ton of browsing. Foter's main strength seem to be Wordpress integration. They have a plug-in that allows Wordpress bloggers to access their library with minimal hassle.

http://foter.com/

Watermarked? -- No
Registration? -- No
Attribution? -- Yes

EveryStockPhoto.com is a creative commons search engine like Foter, but with better results, but again keyword based. This site also indexed other stock photo websites, and even lists the requirements if you need to sign up with that other website. however, it doesn't seem to have been updated in a bit, as it still lists PhotoXpress as having free content when it no longer offers free content. As it's a meta search engine, the actual requirements depends on the actual download site you go to.

If you register you can comment, tag, and collect (in collections) the pictures, but seem to be not required for download.

http://www.everystockphoto.com/

Watermarked? -- N/A
Registration? -- N/A
Attribution? -- N/A

You may ask, what's MemeGenerator.net doing here in free images? The answer is... that's what it does! Take a character meme, add two lines of captions, and you have a perfect image to illustrate a point! (esp. if the meme's popular) While the original purpose of MemeGenerator is to generate new Internet memes by playing off the old ones, it works perfectly to create images for your hub or blog. If you can keep the meme alive by following the same "style", even better!

An example is to your right... by playing off the Lord of the Rings meme "One does not simply walk into Mordor...".

http://memegenerator.net/

I hope you find this list helpful. I personally use FreeDigitalPhotos.net quite a bit. It's great if you just need a pretty generic illustration. However, if you are feeling creative and want to help an Internet meme, feel free to adapt the meme to your message by using the MemeGenerator.net to help you make a point... and get an image!

Remember, you shouldn't pirate pictures, and you don't have to when there are so many legal and free ways to find pictures for you to use legally. So go out there and find some images and liven up your hub and blog.

If you don't want to use your real picture as your profile pic, there are a couple options you should consider. Share / export the picture and voila, you have a new profile pic! While these are mostly Android Apps, there are iOS versions as well.

Androdify

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