All roads on the path to royalty-free stock photos invariably lead to the prolific and free Stock.Xchng or Wikimedia Commons and the commercial but very reasonable iStockphoto.com, among others. But it might also be worthwhile to check out a few lesser-known options. Here are some resources that might surprise you.

PhotoRogue.com

Searched high and low, and still unable to come up with just the photograph you need? Well, at this unusual site, you can request for a picture — anything you want — and volunteer photographers from around the world will attempt to meet your requirements. For free, of course! However, there isn’t any guarantee that your request will be met; thus, it pays to be reasonable in your request and expectations. Ov­erall, as a concept, it is certainly heart-w­arming.

Unprofound.com

Unprofound.com specialises in indexing photographs by colour. While this might not be particularly useful for most people, it could be an interesting option for designers and others looking for pictures to go with a certain colour scheme. Click on any of the seven colour swatches to begin, or enter a keyword. There is no sign-up required to download photos. The images remain the property of the photographers, but are freely usable for personal or commercial purposes by anyone.

Everystockphoto.com

This isn’t exactly a stock photography site; rather, it is a search engine for free stock photos. It indexes over three million photos from various resources of free stock photography, including Stock.Xchng, Flickr, MorgueFile, Wiki­pedia and Wikimedia Commons, amo­ng many others. Users may search for photos not just by keywords, but also by licence, resolution and source. This is recommended for those who do­n’t have the time to trawl through mu­ltiple stock photo sites.

NationsIllustrated.com

Need location-specific photos? Try NationsIllustrated, a collection of 7,000+ photos from around the wo­rld. You don’t need to sign up to download photos. Note that the images here are only available for non-commercial use.

KaveWall.com

Looking for quality ma­cro photograp­hy? Try KaveWall.com/s­tock for a coll­ection of 1,700 close-up photographs. The photos can be freely downloa­ded in a lower resoluti­on. If you need the hi­gh-res­olution images, you ne­ed to pay for th­em. The entire KaveW­all set costs $199 (abo­ut Rs 10,000) and single category cost $20 (about Rs 1,000).

Imageafter.com

This is another repository of stock images, comprising over 20,000 photos as well as textures. The site has a slightly dated looks. There is no registration required to download images, and one is free to use the downloaded items in personal or commercial work.

Public-Domain-Photos.com

Just as the name suggests, this site contains a collection of public domain images, free to use for personal or commercial purposes. Apart from over 5,000 photographs, you will also find a large collection of clipart here. No sign-up is needed for downloading.

Thing to remember

While dealing with free stock photographs, remember to check the licensing options carefully. Many free and royalty-free images have restrictions — such as requiring an attribution or link back or using only in non-commercial projects — on them.

(Payal Dhar is a freelancetechnology writer)