Collection of Free Texture Stock Photos

Have you seen the trend of using textures or patterns on web backgrounds lately? They seem to be everywhere. Like here. And here. Or here.

There's more than just wallpaper-like textures too. Check out this background using wood (which also uses a wallpaper) or here.

I set out to find where people were getting this type of background, or at least some inspiration to make their own, and what I found was a plethora of sites providing free texture stock photos. Here are some good ones I found:

Urban Dirty

Texture King

Pixel Perfect Digital

Wild Harmony Studio

Image*After

Grunge Textures

PepFX

Those are of varying quality, but I especially like Urban Dirty, created by Paul Burgess. Be sure to check out his other site DELARGE...very cool.

Texture images are exceedingly useful when creating and editing images too. Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and GIMP users all stand to benefit by these sites.

Know any others that you use?