Where to Find It: Images and Stock Photos

If you are needing images for your bulletin, website, or video screens, there are a number of places you find them on the internet. Please don’t use cheesy clipart!!! Clipart was really never in style, so please refrain from using what you will find in Microsoft Office or Publisher. Here are some of the sites I frequently use. Sometimes you can find great images for free, but occasionally you will need to purchase the graphics you need.

Free Stock Photos

• Stock.xchang – Good site, but not a lot of church specific images
• CreationSwap – Great Christian content
• StockVault

Paid Services

(there are a lot of stock photography sites out there, these are just the ones that I have used)

• iStockPhotos – This is the one I use the most because of their incredible selection.
• PhotoXpress
• BigStockPhoto
• VectorStock
• PhotoMission
• PhotoDune

Google Images and Flickr

One word of caution: Just because you can find a great image using Google Image search or Flickr photo search, doesn’t mean that you can use it for your church. If in doubt, be sure and request permission from the content creator or find an image that uses creative commons licensing. 

• for Flickr, you can use the advanced image search, and click search only creative commons licensed content
• for Google Images, use the advanced image search and click search only images labeled for reuse