Where do you go to if you want a photography or an illustration image? Google? flickr? Well those are nice for a quick and dirty search. However if you want quality and so called royalty free images a better choice is to go to stock photography online databases. Here is a selection of the key players:
- corbisimages.com (owned by Bill Gates; 2010: ≈100 Mio images)
- gettyimages.com (photos more than illustrations; 2010: ≈80 Mio images)
- iStockphoto.com (now owned by gettyimages.com)
- shutterstock (2010: ≈13 Mio images)
- fotolia (2010: ≈10 Mio images)
- dreamstime (2010: ≈10 Mio images)
- stockpodium.com (Company from Bulgaria; 2010: ≈8 Mio images)
- 123rf.com (seems to be similar to stockpodium.com but is a competitor)
- bigstockphoto.com (2010: ≈5 Mio images
- symbolstix.n2y.com (perfect for symbols)
- imagetrail.com (to search across the different providers)
- http://www.sxc.hu/ (according to alexa.com one of the stock image sites receiving the most traffic)
To sum this up I think there is no „one“ leader for stock images as there is e.g. a „Google“ for „search“ or an „Apple“ for „mobile devices“ or like a „Microsoft“ for „office products“.
I hope this list helps you to find the way through the jungle of the stock image libraries and hopefully helps you find and get the image your really need and like …