A beautiful photograph can make the difference between a boring Joomla website and a really attractive one. Take our latest free Joomla template, the Real Estate template, for example. Imagine the same template without the photo in the header. Do you see what a difference that would make? Let's see where you can find photos like that.

You can find images using the google images search engine, but that's not the right way. Every image has a copyright and when you just use Google to find your images, you will almost certainly violate someones copyright. Next to that it won't be so easy to find really stunning photos using google. So there is a better way. There are some great photo sources available and a lot of them are free. Just make sure to check the licence information to know if you can use the images the way you want. Sometimes you are allowed to use the images, but not to distribute them. If you are not sure if you are allowed to use a certain image, just ask permission to the author of the image. 9 times out of 10, you will get the permission to use it the way you want.

Now here are some of the best photo resources:

FreeRangeStock.com: Not one of the largest photo stocks, but all of them are for free. All you need to do, is to sign in.

Stock Vault:  Same category as the previous one: not that many images, but everything is for free.

 Photogen: No two without three: not that big, but totally free.

Wikimedia common: As you can expect with wiki(p)media, everything is licensed under GPL terms, so basically free to use. Here you even don't have to sign in. This one contains all media from the wikipedia sites, which means the collection is really huge. The quality of the images isn't great for every image though.

stock.xchng: One of the best known photo stocks and one of my favorites.  Everything is for free, but make sure to read their license restrictions. It can be different for every image you download. For distribution or commercial use, it's better to contact the author here.

 Morguefile: Also quit known. Not as many photos as stock.exchng, but still one of the best free photo stocks you'll find.

iStockphoto : This one is probably the best photo stock around, but it is not for free. Still it's not that expensive and sometimes it is really worth it to spend a few dollars for a great photo.

 Do you know other good photo stocks? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.