Best Practices in Instructional Design & Use of Learning Technologies

How do I find a free stock photo?

 

The Ultimate Free Stock Photo Search Tool ad-don for firefox (now also available for chrome) helps you to find any image you need for free. It has access to search over 200 free image sites, and in total helps you get quick and easy access to about half a billion images (yes, that’s billion with a B). The rest of this article discusses the reasons for, uses of and issues surrounding the use of free stock images for your project. If you just want to download it click the big logo and download the free stock photo search addon from mozilla addons or chrome extension gallery.

 

What exactly is a ‘free’ stock photo?

 

There are generally considered to be two types of ‘free’ on the internet, most often the distinction is found made by open-source projects and is commonly analogised by the following:

 

Free as in Beer Free as in Speech

This difference is known as Gratis versus Libre: If someone gave you free beer (Gratis), you would have the right to drink it, ie. to ‘use’ it, but not the right to setup a competing brewery producing that same beverage. By comparison free speech (Libre) is the fundamental freedom to share ideas or knowledge gained, so you can do pretty-much anything you like with it...

Via Martin Gysler