Some of our clients need to source images for their websites and communications activities, but don’t have the budget to spend on commercial stock image libraries. Thankfully, there are a number of resources on the web that provide good quality imagery for next to nothing.

We’ve posted previously about using photos from Flickr (and some of the gotchas to look out for) - but there are some other sites worth mentioning also.

iStockphoto is a community site where photographers can upload their photos and illustrations for purchase by other community members for very low cost - between USD$1-$15. If you’re using images on the web you can often get away with using the smaller sizes to keep costs down, though for print purposes you may need to spend more.

The photos are pretty good, though recently have leaned towards more corporate orientation (this might be a result of the site recently being purchased by Getty Images).

Another great site is stock.xchng (as in “exchange”). Similarly to iStockphoto, stock.xchng is a community driven site where users upload photos - however, all photos are free.

Let us know in the comments if you know of any other good sites for finding low-cost images.