Stock Photos for Student Use

Our students like to use images from the web for their projects, which is fine but comes attached with many issues:

1. Copyright/IP infringement
2. Usually find terrible over-compressed images of poor resolution
3. Very high risk of finding inappropriate images

I was hoping we could buy a licence/collection of stock photographs that can be accessed online or a network location, for students to use in their media work. I've however not found anything that doesn't cost absolute fortunes that would appeal to students.

Whilst we could keep a close eye on web filtering and allow access to more image search sites, it would still be of a huge benefit to give students access to high res photographs, especially for anything we plan on printing out on our large format printer (HP Z3200 44") as tiny little compressed for the web jpeg's just don't cut it.

Does anyone have any suggestions? do you use anything yourselves?

There are a couple of sites that come to mind…

1) EveryStockPhoto
2) Flickr with search restricted to just Creative Commons licensed photos.

For Flickr, it might be easier to use one of the various search engines dedicated to finding CC licensed images like CompFight, FlickrCC or Flickr CC Search so you don’t have to keep going to the advanced search options all the time.

Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Commons)
Creative Commons Search (http://search.creativecommons.org/)