Free or less expensive Royalty Free Photo, Stock Photo & Illustration Sources

Take your own photos and jazz them up using a free service like Picnik.com for images you know you can use anyway you want!

deviantArt.com is a huge community of designers and art enthusiasts who regularly post their creations. You can find just about anything - photos, textures, backgrounds, illustrations, fonts and more - some are free, some require payment.

Flickr.com is one of the largest collection of user generated photography on the web. You can literally find anything on Flickr. The key to using Flickr images is understanding the various usage terms. Leah at Working Solo wrote a great, easy to understand post on how to use Flickr images.

Freedigitalphotos.net offers images that are free for web use or can be purchased if you need the high resolution version. No registration is required and you can sell your own images as well.

Imageafter.com is not the most intuitive site to navigate, but it does have more than 21,000 free photos and textures for personal or commercial use.

Imagechef.com is one of my favorite places to get free, fun, one of a kind images for your blog posts. Start with one of a huge variety of basic images, add your own words and phrases, and end up with an image that can easily convey 1,000 words.

Morguefile.com serves as the afterlife for a large volume of free high resolution digital stock photographs and reference images for either corporate or public use. Think of it as digital photography heaven and rather than destroying what they don’t use, many photographers submit their “leftovers” to Morguefile for others to use. Individual images have different usage requirements, so please read everything before using.

Picapp.com is a great source of free editorial and news images. Ideally, it is for bloggers but their images can be used in other media. Now that Picapp.com has a Wordpress plugin, adding news quality images to your post doesn’t get any easier than this.

Photogen.com contains free photos for personal or commercial use. You do have to register in order to download, but you may also upload your own photos for others to use (but you are not compensated).

Stockvault.net is a lot like Freedigitalphotos.net in the sense that the images are free for download, no registration is required and you can share your photos, too.

Stockxchng (aka sxc.hu)offers a large selection of free stock photos and some illustrations. Terms of use request you give them credit as the image source. As a part of the Jupiterimages.com group, Stockxchng also offers premium images.

VERY INEXPENSIVE IMAGE SOURCES

Bigstockphoto.com is a relatively new service from my perspective having just recently found it. Their inventory of more than 2 million images is certainly a good place to start when looking for art. Like many of the other sources in this category, you purchase credits in blocks (roughly $2 per credit) and images run anywhere from 1-6 credits depending on their size.

Dreamstime.com has an inventory of over 4 million images ranging from free to $5 or so. If you buy credits in bulk, they can be as low as 20 cents an image. If you sell your own images the payout is between 50% and 80%. New photos are being added constantly - there are already photos from the Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl Parade from 2009. The site is also available in a choice of languages.

Fotalia offer access to more than 4 million images, vectors and video via individual purchase ($1-$5 each) or via subscription. Very similar to many services in this category, Fotalia allows you to upload your own images for sale and has a community aspect.

iStockphoto.com is one of the sites I use most. Very high quality images and a huge selection make iStockphoto my first choice when looking for photos, vector illustrations, flash, video or audio files for projects. Most images run $1-5 and you buy credits in blocks. You can submit your own images for sale and they have a very active community of artists, designers and marketing pros. Get free images with the Free Image of the Week featured at iStockphoto, too. I usually download these whether I think I will need them or not - because you just never know when they might come in handy.

Stockxpert.com is very similar to iStockphoto in that it carries some of the most reasonably priced, highest quality royalty-free stock images in the $1-10 range. It has a fantastic selection of photos, animation, and illustrations. You may sell your own images, too.

Vecteezy.com specializes in free to inexpensive user submitted vector graphics. While the collection is much smaller than most I have referenced, the quality is pretty good. Sister sites include Flasheezy (Flash files for download) and Brusheezy (Photoshop brushes).

INEXPENSIVE SUBSCRIPTION ONLY SERVICES

AnimationFactory.com - need to dress up those boring PowerPoint presentations? AnimationFactory has more than 500,000 animated clip art (use sparingly), PowerPoint templates, backgrounds and videos. Subscriptions run from $60-200 per year and give you access to unlimited downloads. (Bonus - use this link for 25% off your subscription)

Clipart.com has more than 10 million pieces of royalty-free clip art, photos, vinyl-ready images, Web graphics, illustrations, fonts and sounds available via subscription. Subscription rates are for one week up to one year.

Designious.com is not quite as big as many of the others in this list but they do have some great designs - especially if your audience is in the 15-30 range. You can search for royalty-free stock vectors, vector illustrations and t-shirt designs. Buy stock vectors one by one or have access to all of them via subscription.

iCLIPART.com has millions of downloadable royalty-free clipart images, photos, objects, web graphics, sounds and fonts by subscription. Their images tend to be more on the whimsical side. A monthly subscription is $19.95, however right now you can get the whole year for $29.95 - which is a great deal if this is the type of art you find yourself looking for on a regular basis (perfect for bloggers, teachers, and such)

Tips On SEO for Images

• Use the alt attribute and be descriptive

• Put your images somewhere authoritative - like on Picassa, Wikipedia, or Flickr, and link them back to your site, where possible

• Put words and descriptions around your graphics to provide context and be sure to tag photos with keyword loaded data

• Link your images and graphics to other posts on your site

• Use the keyword as the name of the image

MillionDollarFollow : A new Twitter advertising network

A new Twitter advertising network with some interesting twists, we couldn't help but compare it to the Million Dollar Homepage. MillionDollarFollow (MDF) is quite different, however. Instead of advertising a product or tweeting affiliate links, MDF tries to get its users more followers. Rather than thinking about MDF as an advertising network, it's actually probably best to think about it as a Twitter lottery with some added benefits, even if you don't win. An ad on MDF costs $1, and users who buy an ad are regularly entered into a lottery drawing where they can win new followers. The final winner will receive 1 million followers.

MillionDollarFollow was developed by Jonathan Nelson, who is also behind Twittermass, the auto-follow product we wrote about a few weeks ago.

MDF uses the Twitter OAuth protocol, so your login and password are safe, but, when you buy an ad, you also authorize MDF to send a tweet about your ad to your Twitter stream.

It should be noted that when you sign up for MDF, you do authorize the service to automatically subscribe you to up to 150 Twitter users (there are 150 drawings in total). You can check the FAQ for more details about how the system works. Advertisers can also put a MDF widget on their homepages, which is obviously designed to give MDF more exposure, but, as Jonathan tells us, it can also increase a user's chance of winning.

10 cents from every one dollar ad will be donated to Malaria No More.

One Click Live Mobile Blogging

Mobile blogging became a modern reality, and all the related accessories, applications, and services, are getting enormous attention from the blogging community. Today, we present CellSpin - a one-click live mobile blogging application for video, voice, photo, text blogging, supporting several Social Networking Sites. First, we mentioned the application last June, but since its applicability grew significantly in terms of the supported sites and supported mobile gadgets.


Description:
CellSpin is a FREE and easy to use mobile blogging application that lets you blog photos, audio, video, and text from your phone to popular blogging and social networking communities.

Supported Sites:

• MySpace,
  
• Facebook,
  
• Google Blogger,
  
• WordPress,
  
• YouTube,
  
• Flickr,
  
• Picasa
  
• Live Journal,
  
• Live Spaces,
  
• Typepad,
  
• Twitter,
  
• Pownce, and
  
• eBay.

To use CellSpin, you must visit their website http://www.cellspin.net and create a free account.

Things you can do with CellSpin:

• Voice blogging
  
• Photo blogging
  
• Text blogging
  
• Video blogging
  
• Use CellSpin as a voice notes application
  
• Use the Select Media button to select and post pre-existing media from your phone
  
• Use MySpace and Facebook MoBlog applications from CellSpin
  
• Record an audio conversation and embarrass your friends
  
• Securely post audio, photos, video, and text to live eBay auctions
  
• Podcast with the click of a button
  
• Record voice meeting minutes and post them to a blog
  
• Share media on CellSpin community blogs ("clogs") on various discussion topics
  
• Record and post live events to blogs or clogs, becoming an on-the-scene journalist
  
• Create your own novel, fun, profitable uses...
  

Supported phones:
http://www.cellspin.net/phones/

Customer feedback:
Kenny from Odblog tested the application in the field, and he provides the following feedback. The pictures are more impressive than the standard blogger uploads as you get a larger image without having to play around with the html. The image is also automatically rotated. The text appears nicely beneath the picture as the entries are grouped by date, and I also managed to send a status update to twitter through it too. I’m thinking this would be a great way to record a trip using different media types videos for peer assessment, audio to analyze geographical description, text as a field logbook, 140 characters to summarize key features of a field location and photos to evaluate field sketches. My only gripe would be that the application seems to stay open permanently. This might just be a phone bug or it might be me being tech incompetent!

Download (for Blackberry):
http://www.blackberrytoday.com/software/files/CellSpin.zip

Screen shots from the Website (Click to Enlarge):

CellSpin

CellSpin

CellSpin

New Trends in Logo Design 2009

Psychedelic Pop Backgrounds

Origami

Tactile

Arabesque

Classic Modernism

Pictograms

80’s Geometry

Typographic Logos

Street Art

Puzzle Patterns

Tools for Choosing Right Domain Names

• Instant Domain Search
  Checks the availability of domain names in real time as you type, and provides links to popular registrars.
• ThinkMap Visual Thesaurus
  Shows words linked to synonyms and other related words in interactive maps made of nodes and links. Paid membership required after a brief free trial period.
• Visuwords
  A free visual thesaurus based on Princeton’s WordNet database.
• Visual Dictionary
  Online version of the Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary. You can look at images to learn the names of things.
• Name Types
  Types of names in more detail, with lots of examples.

• Picky Domains
  The community helps to select optimal domain names.
• Make Words
  A generator for domain names
• Nameboy
  Finds free domain names combining two or more keywords.

• Dyyo
  Searches for domain names with max. 4 or 5 characters. There are still some interesting options available; however, there are no free domains with three characters any more.
• Domain Hack Search Utility
  Finds domains, which are the combination of exotic TLDs, directories und subdomains. For instance, http://smashin.gm/agazine/ (can be registered as a Gambian domain)
• StuckDomains
  Finds expired CNO-Domains.

• Word Mixer
  Mixes several words together, combining them to create new terms. Ideal for creative domain names.
• Rhymezone
  Finds terms similar to English words. Once the domain you’ve chosen is already taken, you can use this tool to generate similar words.
• Domains Bot
  Looking for similar names.

Free CAPTCHA scripts for websites

1. reCAPTCHA
reCAPTCHA is a free service which helps prevent automated abuse of your site (such as comment spam or bogus registrations) by using a CAPTCHA to ensure that only humans perform certain actions.

2. Securimage
Securimage is an open-source free PHP CAPTCHA script for generating complex images and CAPTCHA codes to protect forms from spam and abuse. It can be easily added into existing forms on your website to provide protection from spam bots. It can run on most any webserver as long as you have PHP installed, and GD support within PHP. Securimage does everything from generate complicated CAPTCHA images to making sure the code the user entered was correct.

3. WebSpamProtect
WebSpamProtect allows you to instantly add verification image (CAPTCHA) to your web site and protect your forms against spam robots. In order to protect your web form, this system requires that you install a small piece of code onto your web page. The code requires that your web site support PHP, Perl, ASP or ASP.NET. Basic plan is free but you can buy a Premium, Advanced or Professional paln with a little expense.

4. Cryptographp
Cryptographp is a PHP script for generate captchas. Cryptographp limit the robots bombarding spams and automating the forms: spaces members subscriptions, guestbooks, forums... This script is free and does not use any database. It is compatible with PHP >= 4.3.0. Cryptographp also exists into plugins for WordPress, wpMu for WordPress, Symfony and Guppy.

5. CAPTCHA-Service
captchas.net provides CAPTCHA images and audio files you can use in html-forms. To use this technology, your web pages have to be generated dynamically in any programming language PHP, ASP, Perl, Python, JSP, Ruby.

6. WP Captcha-Free
WP Captcha-Free blocks comment spam by using a combination of time-based hash (a.k.a. Time Based Tokens, TBT) and JavaScript (AJAX). When a comment is posted the plugin validates a hash based on time (and some other parameters). Comments posted via automated means will not have a hash or will have an expired hash and will be rejected. Unlike using a captcha, this does not place any burden on the commenter.

7. ProtectWebForm
ProtectWebForm is a service to add CAPTCHA images and audio files on your website. You have to create an account, generate your CAPTCHA type with all the desired parameters and include it on your web pages.You can also use it on your Wordpress template with this plugin.

8. ProtectWebForm
OpenCaptcha is a simple web service which requires no special configurations or modules. Basic installation is cut-and-paste, and requires no ability to program image manipuation scripts. New fonts, image algorithms, and distortions applied weekly.

9. Form-to-email script protected by Captcha
This form-to-email script is intended to collect data from an HTML form and send it to a specified email address using a CAPTCHA script to stop spam. It works with any kind of HTML form and you can use it multiple times on your pages.

10. freeCap
freeCap is a GPL CAPTCHA script to stop spam. It has been used on any form on any kind of website. It does require some knowledge of PHP to install, though there are several captcha plugins for forum and blog software listed below.