When I first started out in the web design industry, 99% of the graphics and images I used on a website were from Google. Although this may seem like a versatile way to work, it really isn’t. Photos taken from Google images have two huge drawbacks. Firstly, they are generally very poor quality (both in terms of photographic content, and image compression). Secondly, they are (almost always) under some type of copyright. Not great for using in web projects.

A couple of years ago, I stumbled across the site iStockPhoto. It offers royalty free stock photography, and allows you to upload your photos to your online area there. It works in two main ways:

• Uploading - You can sign up for an account, and upload your favourite holiday snaps, photos of people, objects or landscapes. Literally anything. Other people can browse through these, and pay a fee of $1 to download them. At present, you can take away between 20% and 40% of this figure - depending upon how many downloads you have had. The more popular your photos are, the more money you make.

  However, making money isn’t really what interested me in their service. You can convert your earnings directly into new credits to download photography. This makes it perfect for someone like me, a casual photographer and web designer, as I can effectively get my hands on top quality stock photography for free!

• Downloading - There are, without a doubt, some fantastic stock images in the collection. All the various CSS styles on this blog have an individual header images. Each header image is taken from iStock (just an example). The majority of the work in my portfolio makes use of iStockPhoto in some way. Images on offer range from isolated objects on a white background, to beautiful high definition photos of wildlife and nature.

They even have a ‘Designer Showcase’ where people can show off how they used iStockPhoto in their work. A couple of my submissions can be found here and here.

It’s worth signing up and downloading a few images just to appreciate the collection and quality of what is on offer. Give it a go: