Update: The site has changed and now most half-decent photographs are paid-only. You have to hover over photos to see if they are paid or free, and the endless promotion of their paid plan gets very annoying very fast. I feel a bit sad, it was such a great site.

Trying to find truly free stock photos has always been painful. Usually, the available 'free' resources come with unwieldly terms such as the requirement to publicly attribute the source or acknowledge the author. Now I fully support the Creative Commons licenses for literary works, but you just can't plaster attributions across the artwork for a brochure, website banner or logo. It's not an appropriate model.

Recently I stumbled upon unsplash.com, a stock photo site that is actually free, and that has a remarkably permissive license. You can freely use photos without giving attribution, although they appreciate it, in commercial and non-commercial works. The only restrictions are that you can't resell the photos or use them to build a competing service.

The photos are truly excellent quality (eg. the tuskfish on the front page, which is by David Clode). Check it out next time you need stock photos for a project.