Stock photography is often used in web design to fullfil the needs of a creative assignment instead of hiring a photographer. The number of sites offering stock photography is growing year on year, and whilst the recognisable stock image galleries are still some of the best, Getty Images, Dreamstime, Corbis etc there are also some completely free stock image galleries popping up that can provide designers with quality professional imagary, without adding to the cost of the project.

Here we take a look at the top 5 stock image sites that provide their images for free.

Stock.Xchng

Stock Xchng features over 400,000 high quality images. They are one of the leading free stock image sites on the web and also offer paid images as well as free stock images.

Morgue File

The Morgue file offers free high resolution digital stock images, it is a classic resource that has been the standard for free stock imagary over the last few years.

Free Stock Photography

Over 100 categories on this site. A little less choice than some of the others but you can still find high quality photographs completely free.

Free Pixels

This site has an easy to use search function along with a really useful tag cloud. Search over 3,000 images however some are paid images.

Stock Vault

Over 13,000 from over 3,600 photographers! They also have really helpful tutorials, videos and articles making this site a must for every designers bookmark bar.