Stock images are images which already exist and are provided for use in projects such as powerpoint presentations, documents etc. For worship, stock images can be used to provide backgrounds, to make a point in a talk, or to illustrate a theme. Used wisely, they can add significantly to the worship experience.

All photos are copyright, although some may be licensed for use under a license which allows anyone to use them.

The image bank hosted on this site provides a searchable database of several thousand images for worship and other events - give it a look.

Copyright free library - library of photos which are royalty free.

stock xchange - Another library of photos which are free to download and use. Note the restrictions on some images, but this is a very highly recommended site.

morguefile - contains free high resolution digital stock photographs and reference images for either corporate or public use. The official purpose is to provide free image reference materials for all creative pursuits. It contains over 55,000 digital images, which can be both searched and accessed via a well organized set of categories.

US Government archives - US government publishes a wide range of photos, many royalty free. Note that there are a lot of photos available here - a community indexed archive which includes over 27,000 of them is here.

PixelPerfect Digital - an image archive offering more than 3,000 images free for commercial and non-commercial use.

The Open Photo Project - a stock photo community and framework devised, implemented and supervised by Michael Jastremski. The goal of OpenPhoto is to unite photographers and users through Creative Commons licensing.

Lycos news photos - Lycos news photos. There are some restrictions on use here but it's probably the safest if you need news photos.

ImageAfter - an online library of free photographic images that cover lots of categories with good image quality. All images are free for re-use in personal and commercial works.

Wikipedia:Public domain image resources - a large collection of images sorted into categories and searchable. Most are public domain although there are notes on copyright tagged with many images.

PDPhoto.org - a repository for free public domain photos. It contains about 2,000 photographs classified using a large number of different categories. Unless something is clearly marked as being copyrighted, you can assume it is free to use.

Ourmedia - a new non-commercial free clearinghouse for all media content to be shared, re-used and enjoyed by as many people as possible. In partnership with the Internet Archive, Ourmedia makes available unlimited storage space for individual publishers provided the material is not protected by copyright, so some form of re-use is associated with every image.

Flickr - a repository of personal shots and individual home photo collections rather than a public repository for images to be shared and re-used. Each person publishing images on Flickr can select and specify the type of licensing to be applied to their own pictures, from fully reserved copyright to any of the Creative Commons licenses. Look for the explicit author permissions specified on each photo page.

Stockvault - a new stock photo resource which has just started offering medium-sized images for personal and non-commercial usage. Stockvault evolved from stock.b-man.dk and features images from various photographers, both professionals and amateurs. The StockVault gallery has a category-based access area as a valid alternative to the standard keyword search.

Google image search - probably the best general image search on the web.