Finding free, legal photos

You may know that many photos online are protected by copyright laws. In fact, unless something specifically states that it can be reproduced and used by others, it is by default copyrighted, even if it doesn't say anything about it. Since it is against the law to use these photos without permission, it is important, especially as a church, that we find legal photos to use. I confess that I haven't really thought much about this until recently, so I'm sure that I've used hundreds of illegal photos in my media shows over the years. However, I'd like for the media team to be more responsible about this from now on. Annoyingly, most of these legal photos will cost some money, but there are some good sites that provide high quality free photos that we can use. I've compiled a list of some of the sources I've found.

First Option: Photos with a Creative Commons license. If you use Firefox for your internet browser, in the search box up there right next to the address bar, you will see the Google logo. Click that, and from the drop-down menu, choose the Creative Commons option. Search for whatever you want to through here. I think the default for this will be to search for regular websites, but you can also choose images, which will take you to all creative commons licensed images on Flickr. The user interface for this is rather bulky and annoying with the green frame and all, but you can remove that. Keep in mind that here, not all photos are licensed equally. Most are usable for our purposes, but some say that no editing can be done to the photo, or that the photographer must be contacted and credited, or other such things. To see this, there is a little Creative Commons icon at the bottom of the photo's page, and you can click on that to see the full term of the license. If you use Internet Explorer, I'm not exactly sure how you would find these photos, sorry.

Second Option: Free stock photo sites. These vary greatly in quality and content, so I'll just give you the links of what I've found to be the best ones. If you really want to try to use the crappy ones too, I'll email you some of those links if you really so desire.

http://www.sxc.hu/ This is probably the best one out there. The site has 300,000+ photos and the images are generally quite high quality. You need to register to use, but that's easily done. Keep in mind that at the bottom of each search result page, there will be a few images from stockxpert.com, their partner site, that they'll try to entice you to buy. It can be rather disappointing to click on the perfect image, only to realize that it costs money, but I trust you'll figure out what's what quite quickly.

http://morguefile.com/ Also pretty good, but what bothers me here is that the preview images are small, making it slightly annoying to use. You're somewhat more likely to get a snapshot-type photo here, but with a bit of editing, they can usually be made presentable.

http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/free_stock_photos/ For whatever reason, I haven't actually used this one, but it seems pretty good. Like the sxc.hu, they have a partner site that will try to get you to buy their images, but it's easy enough to ignore it.

http://www.everystockphoto.com This site is a search engine that indexes many free stock photo sites, including some listed above. This is certainly a handy tool, but remember to check each individual photo license.

Third Option: Take your own photos! If you can't find anything online, or you have the perfect props or scene, by all means get out your camera and take a picture!

So that's a non-exhaustive list of free photo sites that you may find helpful. If you ever find any other useful sites, please feel free to let me know what they are, so everyone can make use of them.