Several weeks ago there was a thread in the Hubpages forum about where to find free stock photos for your websites and hubs and awhile back someone emailed me with a request to put a Hub together about the topic, so here you go!

For many of my hubs I actually use photos I've taken myself. I have tons of photos I can use in my Disney hubs and usually the same is the case for most of my travel hubs. But for when I don't have my own photos, creative-commons licensed photos from Flickr come in very handy and I explain how to use those below.

There are other options as well though, so here's a list of various places you can find free stock photography, not only for your Hubs, but for your other websites and projects as well.

There are tons of creative-commons licensed photos on Flickr that you can use on your websites with attribution. To find photos, you want to go to the Advance Search page on Flickr, enter your keywords and then scroll down the page and check the box marked "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed photos", then hit "search".

For attribution, I usually put a link to the photographer's Flickr page in the "photo data" in the photos module. You can see how that looks on one of my London hubs.

Creative commons is basically a licensing alternative to the standard, "All Rights Reserved" copyright. It differs from simply allowing your creative work to enter the public domain in that you control just how much use someone can make out of your work. For example, many creators license their creative commons work for non-commercial use only. Others may use a license that allows you to actually modify the work. You'll see this a lot with creative-commons licensed music that is designed to be used for beats or background sound. So you can use it to create derivative works. Some photos are also licensed so that you can create derivative works from them as well.

To read more about the different options, check out the Creative Commons website for all the details. Incidentall, their website also includes a search feature to find cc-licensed works, but personally I find Flickr more convenient.