Free stock photography can great great for low-budget or…no-budget projects.  In a lot of cases you get what you pay for, but there’s some really nice shots hidden in there too.  Some resources that I like to use are:

http://sxc.hu/
http://www.dreamstime.com/
http://www.freestockphotos.biz/
http://www.rgbstock.com/
http://pixabay.com/

I contribute to stock exchange myself. Also, if you’re looking for textures you’ll have a much easier time finding some free resources.  There’s a lot of different texture websites out there, but my favorite so far is:

http://www.cgtextures.com/

A few more that have some restrictions:

http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
You can only get very tiny photos here

No longer free u.u

http://www.stockfreeimages.com/
They only allow you to download one photo for free

From my experience Photoshop’s “Save for web and devices” will give you the biggest bang for your buck.  It’ll give you the lowest file sizes with the least amount of artifacts.

However, one problem I had is that it’s difficult to resize a lot of images in bulk.  Especially if you want to compress images in sub directories.  After a lot of searching I came across this useful little snippet.  One thing – it’s only meant for .JPGs.  So any other format and you won’t be finding this so useful…but it might not be too hard to tweak.

To use this first download the script on your computer and open Photoshop.  Go to file>scripts>browse, select the script, then select the folder containing you .JPG images.

You can edit the file in notepad, dreamweaver, whatever.  To change to quality edit this line:
SaveForWeb(saveFile,90); // set quality to suit
Where 90 refers to the quality setting.

I also did some editing to this so it would also resize images before compressing them.  First find the line:
app.preferences.typeUnits = TypeUnits.PIXELS;
After it add:
doc.resizeImage(200, 133);
where 200,133 is the image size.  I think I did have some issues with stretching so check the aspect ratio beforehand.

Download the script here

For a project I wrote this JavaScript based image zoom in application.   At the time I couldn’t find anything out there that I could use to get the desired effect (at least w/out shelling out some dough) – so I opted to write something myself.

The entire idea was not well received…so I never actually finished it.   So this is essentially just a “proof of concept”.  It demonstrates that you can zoom in, zoom out, and move an image around within a specified area without the use of flash.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to finish this, or really even have a reason to finish, but so it doesn’t get lost I thought I would post it up here.

Regardless of the outcome it was a good exercise in JavaScript 🙂

Click here to see it in action!

The zoom icons used in this are from Dry Icons

Image file formats and what they stand for:

.JPG Joint Photography Experts Group

.GIF Graphic Interchange Format

.PNG portable network graphic

.TIFF Tagged Image File Format

.BMP Bit Map Picture

.SVG Scalable Vector Graphics

.RAW raw data