Most of the popular stock photo agencies on the internet have a section of their site where they offer free images. Some agencies will offer an image of the week, while others will offer a library of images. As a photographer, offering some of your work for free is a great way to get customers into your portfolio. For the customers, the opportunity to have a free image is a nice bonus.
At Dreamstime, they have a library of over 115,000 free photos which is one of the biggest database in the market! The only additional restrictions from their royalty-free terms is that the use of the free images is limited to 10,000 copies. Just because these are free images, does not mean they are poor quality or images that no one would use. They are actually large, detailed, beautiful images that may be perfect for your project.
Included in Dreamstime's free image library are pictures of flowers, coffee beans, interesting buildings, textures, food, landscapes, birds, fruit, dogs, people, and wine – just to name a few. If you are working on a website or blog, these images may be perfect to bring some color and visual interest to the site. The images may also provide some great visuals for that Powerpoint presentation you are working on for a meeting. Consider all of the potential these free images may have in your work and use them to your advantage.
Dreamstime actually has overall inexpensive fees for licensing their images. You can purchase royalty-free images for as little as 20¢ a piece. With over 11 million images in their library and over 26,000 contributing photographers, the Dreamstime library is continuously growing – including their great big selection of free images.
Large selection, not so much for the quality…