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The term stock photography is used to describe the supply of photographs often from professional photographers) that are licensed for specific uses. Stock photography is used to fulfill the needs of creative assignments instead of hiring a dedicated photographer to do a photoshoot and thus reducing costs and time significantly and still getting the images you need. Stock images can found in many place in the form of online databases, categorized and easily searchable with an easy option for the users to purchase and then directly download them, something that proves to be very convenient. When talking about stock photography we are often referring to royalty-free images, but here the word free has a bit different meaning and it is that you pay just once for the image and not every time you use it. Luckily for us there are also quite some places that do offer free (as in completely free) to use stock photos or licensed under CC license (Creative Commons) that also can be a great help for you for any web project you might be working on.

List of useful places for free stock photos:

1. flickr
This is one of the most popular photo sharing websites online and here quite a lot of the photos are free or CC licensed so you can use them in your projects without problems. No need to register to browse or download them. Flickr also offers royalty-free stock photos so be sure to carefully check the license of the photos you might consider using…

2. stock.xchng
stock.xchng is one of the biggest communities for free stock photos online — there are over 2,500,000 registered users and around 400,000 photos available online that you can browse trough and download. You need to register an account in order to be able to download the photos.

3. deviantART
DeviantART is much similar to Flickr, but the community started around the idea of users to show off their artwork and not just digital photos they made, but becoming popular worldwide you can as well find a lot of free stock photos there, just be careful to reed the usage limitations if there are such on each photo. No need to register to download the photos.

4. openphoto

5. freerange

6. stockvault

7. morguefile

8. pixel perfect digital