Searching for images for design projects is one of the daily frustrations of any designer, especially when clients are not willing to pay for imagery but still want the highest quality. I love browsing Getty Images’ Vast collection of exquisite images, but they’re way out of the league of most companies in terms of budget.
In the past I’ve used websites such as www.sxc.hu (Stock.XCHNG) which has a large database of free to use images with various degrees of usage rights.
Flickr.com is another great source of images and it has a surprising amount of great looking high quality images, though it’s a bit of a chore sifting through the images and finding those with appropriate licenses.
I liked searching through this flash based related tag flickr search tool. It brings up some options much quicker and allows you to randomly browse tags which are related.
I just found the creative commons search page, which allows one to search Flickr, Google, BlipTV and a few other sites for creative commons media to use in your projects. http://search.creativecommons.org/
What’s your favourite place online to find imagery, free, paid for, whatever.