Free Stock Photography and Illustration for eLearning

Designing a cool learning experience in your favorite authoring tool and the built-in images such as PowertPoint (Office) clipart is driving you crazy?

There’s an app for that, I mean, a website (more than that, actually). Here are some that I use or have used in the past:

Stock Exchange: you can download photos for free here, they have quite a vast selection. All you have to do is register and agree to the terms to download images at no cost.

IconFinder: If you’re looking for icons for your courseware and materials, this place has all you need (unless you want to create your own from scratch – good luck).

Microsoft Images (Clipart, Illustration and Photos): This website offers a LOT of great images that appear in the Office Clipart Search funtion, the search here is more comprehensive and yields fantastic results. A tip, you can download clipart images in .wmf format, bring them into a Microsoft Office application like Word or PowerPoint and ungroup that image to edit portions of it to create a new image from it! 

Note: Everyone, I know there are numerous other services like these, but I find myself coming back to these specific ones more often. Please feel free to add your own suggestions with descriptions in the comments  below and I can incorporate more services onto this post later.