When I create my non-commercial artwork using photos, I tend to grab things from any old place online. I change them so much you wouldn’t be able to recognise them anyway, but even so I still restrict that to my amateur work.
As I may start requiring the use of online images for commercial work, I figure I should sign up to stock photo sites, for access to royalty free images. Preferably for free, or a minimal monthly fee, rather than a per-image charge.
Does anyone else use them, and have any recommendations or potential pitfalls?
Royalty-free stock photo sites can be an excellent bargain. Usually low-res versions will cost you only a few dimes per image. High-res versions suitable for print work can be more expensive.
The two biggest players are Shutterstock and iStockPhoto, both of which have ginormous collections (with a lot of overlap.)
I recommend stock.xchng for personal work, and for commercial work I use iStockPhoto, which is piggybacked on stock.xchng. When you search for a pic it gives you results from both sites, so it saves significant time.
Like picker, I also stock.xchng for royalty free photos. On a somewhat related note, I also have a couple of other sites I use for vector artwork. VectorPortal.com is great for design elements, templates, symbols and the like. And brandsoftheworld.com has tons of free company logos. This site, I think is possibly “illegal” (at least straddling a grey area), but none of my customers have complained when I used nice vector artwork off that website as opposed to the crappy 72dpi logo off their corporation’s website.