Good royalty free photography?

November 30, 2004 10:18 AM

I work in the design department of a small weekly newspaper and we need some good royalty free photography. [MI]

We already own a generic clip art collection so are especially in need of a good, general stock photo library. We don't have much of a budget for this purchase, so recommendations on the cheap are appreciated.

posted by maniactown to media & arts (10 comments total)

Photodisc Blue at Getty Images
posted by Dean King at 10:32 AM on November 30, 2004

I swear by stockXchange.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 10:32 AM on November 30, 2004

At OCW we have a HUGE collection of URLs to places with essentially royalty free photos. The OCW Web site also has a CC license though we request our photos not be used for commercial purposes.

I'll email you a list of those URLs.
posted by bkdelong at 10:33 AM on November 30, 2004

second stockXchange, very useful resource. Make sure you check whether or not the photos are actually free or not before you use them (it says so on each photo's page).
posted by signal at 10:50 AM on November 30, 2004

I used Photos.com for a project once. The nice thing about them is that you can get a one-month subscription (130 USD) fairly cheaply and download up to 250 photos per day during that month. So it's great for short-term projects.
posted by Otis at 11:42 AM on November 30, 2004

Pixel Perfect Digital - and scroll down for links to similar sites.
posted by O9scar at 12:42 PM on November 30, 2004

istockphoto.com is probably my favorite royalty free site, though you might want to check the licensing to make sure you can use the images in a newspaper. Quality varies wildly, but there are some good photographers there, and for $1.50 a download, I can overlook some noise.

I have used Photodisc in the past, but their stock photo pricing has almost tripled in the past eight or nine years, so I don't bother much with them any more. Around these parts, I can get a photographer for a half day for the price Photodisc charges for one super high res shot.
posted by MegoSteve at 12:50 PM on November 30, 2004

istockphoto is great, though quite limited in certain categories. There's also istockpro, higher quality still fairly cheap.
posted by rschroed at 1:23 PM on November 30, 2004

There are 124,000 digitized documents and photos in the Archival Research Catalog of the National Archives, and the majority are in the public domain.
posted by modavis at 1:45 PM on November 30, 2004

Let's not forget the Free Public Domain Photo Database; as a newespaper assistant,
you should already know a "Morgue File" has nothing to do with morgues.
posted by Smart Dalek at 1:58 PM on November 30, 2004