Flickr is a very popular site for finding royalty-free images and boasts of having over 13 billion photos in its library and a community of over 120 million users.

That’s a lot of photographs, and a lot of people!

Well I, for one, have no reason to doubt the good people at Flickr, and even if the above are rough estimates one thing is for sure – they sure do have a lot of images! Here’s one I found, by a photographer called Zolakoma, which I really like. Here’s the link if you want to see more of this photographer’s work: https://flic.kr/p/ag4sP7

Flickr is owned by Yahoo and in order to use it you have yo sign up for a (free) Yahoo account. That’s all easy to do and well worth the effort because there really are a lot of very good images in there. However, if I have my super-critical hat on, there is a lot of not-so-good stuff in there too but try to bear in mind – it’s FREE.

Don’t expect a Shutterstock-like selection of top-quality artwork and images, Flickr is really all about photographs that have been submitted by its community and who do not get, or expect, and remuneration. Some of them are very good and the search facilities are very useful in finding what you want. For anyone that needs a lot of images for their blog or website, Flickr images could save you a lot of money.

You can download the images you want, for free, and use them, for free – what more could you need? If you do use Flickr images on a website, Flickr ask that you post a link back to them plus an acknowledgement of where the image is taken from, all of which is fair and reasonable.

There is a Pro version of Flickr, priced at just $5.99 per month or $49.99 per year, which gives you a few extra goodies but does not change the availability of the images that you need.

All in all, Flickr images are a welcome alternative to the library images you get from the other, paid for and often quite expensive, image libraries – why not give it a shot?