Hi Everyone,

Day to day most of us use royalty free image galleries for web & other print media development.

But royalty free does not mean free images.
Let me clarify, royalty free means you can use those images for intended use without paying ongoing fee. That means company can still charge you one off fee.

Recently one of web design company (who designed our client's web page) used royalty free images without paying to image gallery (Corbis). Image gallery did not waste time and filed legal suit for a huge amount against our client.

After this incident we did not work with that company again. Also we placed a new process to verify every image included in web pages and get exact information about it.

One more thing I would like to point here. Sometime these image galleries have images in free royalty free section and once images are popular, they might move to paid royalty free images. You must keep record of screenshot of the pages while downloading those images. This is essential for your own record.

This is very important especially if your end client is sizeable company (MNC or public sector company).

I am wondering if there are open source image galleries there? Similar to WikiPedia where we can use content freely, we should be able to use images freely?

Thanks to digital camera, everyone of us have a huge collection of images to contribute, we should be able to create such community which would allow sharing and using images as per requirement.