Another one of the world's top image providers is Corbis, a stock, editorial, & portrait agency which is actually owned by Microsoft. They provide an extensive collection of stock, editorial, portrait, royalty-free, and rights-managed images. You can actually register for a personal account with them which allows you to view "unwatermarked" images. If you like what you see and you have an account you have the option to order photos and I was told they even provide direct downloading. Check it out... hxxp://www.corbis.com

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Be careful, royalty-free does not mean "totally available without paying anything".
for instance, the "coffee machine" image referenced "42-15413440" il royalty-free, and if you want to have it you will have to pay US$ 80 for the 424px x 640 px (640 k), and $345 for the 2546x3840 pix image !
So, you don't pay the royalty, you only pay a kind of participation to storage and network fees. Of course, $80 is nothing for a real commercial use, but for people like me it's rather expensive, I will try another way (no image or photographying my dog or my bird).

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I have been working on v2.0 of my site and i needed stock photography of skateboarders. After an hour of googling i found this website http://www.sxc.hu/ , i love it, everything is FREE, all you have to do is ask the owner for permission! This is by far the best stock photo exchnage site i have ever been to. I have not had any problems with them YET

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This site is simply wonderful. Wonderful. I use it for quite a long time.
I just hope it gets as big as Corbis someday... It's very unlikely being it free, but...

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yea,

I tried it too a few weeks ago. the fotos are pretty good + u can see them in larger size, but not in original size too bad, isn't it?

Another good site is fotolia.com, I have an account there too and the pictures are good, the problem is that there aren't so many options for searching pics by keyword, category, etc.... like on corbis

I also recommend Photostockplus.com : same as fotolia, not too many options for searching, but still they are very exigent with the fotos they are selling

 

 

 

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One of my fav's is www.morguefile.com

Photosgraphers put there images there when they are done with them, so other designers can use them for other projects.

We used to use gettyimages a lot until a few years ago when they completely changed their format.

Personally I find Corbis a bit pricy.

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most of these sites you guys listed on here are great sites. i viewed most of them aand they all lots of good stuff.

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And that is why I use www.sxc.hu instead. I don't know the conditions of which I am allowed to use its images, but it sounds "safer" to me.

Stock photography rules/laws seem somewhat blurry/blunt to me. =[

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