It is all very well to talk about nice background images, but where do you find them?
One obvious answer would be that you are an enthusiastic photographer and create your own content. Another one would be that you are a dab hand at image processing and assemble your own material on an image editor. (Which is, of course, a really cool thing to do and we will certainly be talking more about this later). But, let us say that you are neither - you do not take photographs and you do not make digital art either. In that case your best option is to look for online stock photography and vector art.
stock.xchng is a stock photography portal which makes its content available to you under various types of creative commons licenses. You first need to register and this is free. Once you are a member, the site gives you a brilliant advanced search menu through which you can find images which you can then also put under themed lightboxes, which hold up to 60 photographs each. Please make sure to read the terms and conditions of all the photos which you use. I actually went ahead and put together a few background image lightboxes for you, which you can look at also:
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=lightboxes&lid=603779http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=lightboxes&lid=603775
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=lightboxes&lid=603769
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=lightboxes&lid=603757
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=lightboxes&lid=603753
You can obviously search for images on google. However, when you do so, be sure to apply the correct licensing filter from the advanced search page:
http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search
Another very obvious place to look for images is Flickr. If you do not already have a Flickr account, I would advise you to start one immediately. However, I do not think that you even need to be a member to find photos on Flickr. The thing to remember is that not all of the content on Flickr is free to use, in fact most of it is "all rights reserved". So, when you search, you need to go to advanced search, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and check the creative commons boxes. Flickr is absolutely massive and even with the cc restriction applied, it will give you far more results than just about any other photo sharing domain.
http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search
Another very obvious place to look for images is Flickr. If you do not already have a Flickr account, I would advise you to start one immediately. However, I do not think that you even need to be a member to find photos on Flickr. The thing to remember is that not all of the content on Flickr is free to use, in fact most of it is "all rights reserved". So, when you search, you need to go to advanced search, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and check the creative commons boxes. Flickr is absolutely massive and even with the cc restriction applied, it will give you far more results than just about any other photo sharing domain.
Above are two images that I found on Flickr, doing a creative commons search for "abstract background". Total search result was 11.211 btw. Certainly no shortage... One thing to be aware of is that some of these images are not large enough and so they may need some additional work in an image editor (more on what to do later) ;-)
A cool place to find creative commons images (and all sorts of other cool stuff) is wikimedia commons. These will be categorized under specific topics, so they may or may not be good for background images. However, if your site is on a specific topic for which wikimedia commons provides visual content, this may be a good place to look also. Going to the category for large images may find you lots of unexpectedly nice stuff:
The map is abstract enough that it could work with a lot of subjects. The ducks are more problematic, of course - but I can certainly see how a number of these old fashioned prints, nicely cropped and pulled up in random fashion (more on this later) could work with all sorts of subjects.
(Tip: Whatever you do as you are searching for visual material, do not use google or yahoo image search in their default state - but only with the correct licensing filters. You really have no way of knowing if the images you find are available for free usage otherwise. And there is certainly enough good stuff out there that you can use without having to resort to shady means. ;-)
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