If you’re putting up a new website or re-working your old one, these sites offer great stock images at low or no cost.
But beware: If you’re like me, you can get lost looking through all the high-quality options these sites offer. Give me a cup of coffee and iStockphoto or stockxpert and I could get lost in imagery for hours.
When I’m looking for images, these are the sites I use, in the order I work through them. The first two usually yield exactly what I want but I occasionally have use for the others as well. By the way, I get no benefit from recommending these sites.
- stockxpert — royalty-free photos and graphics ranging in price from $1-$10
- iStockphoto — royalty-free photos and images ranging in price from $2-$35.
- Getty Images — long associated with expensive, high-end stock photos, Getty now makes web-sized images available starting at $5
- stock.xchang — free stock photos
- morgueFile — free photos
- Freerange Stock — free stock photos
- Flickr — this link takes you to photos distributed with a Creative Commons license permitting reuse
- ImageBase — free images, including PowerPoint backgrounds
- Mayang’s Free Texture Library — free textures useful for website backgrounds
Have another image site you highly recommend? Let me know in the comments.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.