Wriging

There are sites that provide royalty free images ... for free. I would personally recommend Stock xchange - it's well designed, easy to use, and I haven't had any problems using their royalty free images, ever.

Hope that helps.

Stock xchange (as mentioned above) is good. I'd also recommend Yotophoto where the catalogue free photos for you to use and abuse.

I used to fire up Google image search and use whatever I found appropriate on my non moneymaking blog. Recently, however, I have been creating my own. No risk in doing that.

My Own Post Graphics

Another post graphic I built in Gimp

-Kamen
Kamen Lee Dot Com

Flickr has a section where you can search images using the Creative Commons license - there are varying degrees of permission, some will let you use their Flickr images for free, some want credit. If you give the artist/photographer credit they may become a subscriber to your blog. Win-win situation.

I started taking care of not violating copyrights very shortly after I started blogging. I use Wikipedia/Wikimedia pretty often to find images, haven't been on the stock photo sites (but I'll think I'll give it a shot after this note).

Hey everyone thanks for all the great resources, if you have any more keep them coming.

It's always Wikipedia and CC for me too.

Creative commons have their own search engine that lets you search for CC images on various sites.

Stock photography results I've always found somewhat disappointing. But I have a couple links on my del.icio.us that you can take a look at.

I was surprised to see I'd bookmarked (and forgot about) Getty Images' Royalty Free Image Search which is actually quite good.

Like some here have said already: do check the licences. Of course, there's always something like fair use, but I'm far from an expert on that matter.

I use my own photos in my blog.

As far as other resources...I suggest Wikipedia, Creatuve Commons, and the stock sites, also.

Wikipedia and CC here as well for general pictures. Stock xchange is pretty handy as well.

However, my site is in a niche market (F1) and up-to-date specific images are important to my site. With this in mind, I cheekily contact the individual teams via their website and sign up as a media-bod and get access to images that way. It is cheeky because I'm not really a member of the media - I'm not actually accredited or anything. However, I'm 100% honest on the form and last year 7 of the 11 teams granted me access, and 1 team doesn't mind their images being republished providing they're not altered. Interestingly, it is their images that tend to be of the highest quality. Gotta love Honda F1 for that.

Another source which I'm surprised nobody has mentioned yet is your own. As an example, whenever I go to a motorsporting event I always take my camera. I also befriend some other bloggers in my niche and occasionally ask permission to use their images.

EDIT: And as I say that LorriM chimes in. Great minds think alike...

Flickr CC search and iStockPhoto are the source of my pictures. I am pretty careful about copyright/credit as well.

Thank you all for this information, I've been worrying about copyright issues but will use these resources!

Useful note! I've been using Wikipedia and doing CC searches on Flickr, but I'm going to check out some of the other resources mentioned. I need to get a scanner!

As photographer with a lot of images online generally I don't mind people using my pictures if they ask first and then give a link. 99 out of 100 times I will grant permission.

iStockPhoto.com is another good one that I like to use. With it's huge growth in the last few years, I'm surprised it hasn't already been mentioned. One thing I like about iStock is that they also sell illustrations which many times do a better job of conveying an idea.

Oh you guys totally have to go to CreativeCommons.org. You can search all sorts of content including images that are licensed under the Creative Commons license. Flickr has a ton of images that are available for use under it and you can find them all right there.