When I first started to think about painting miniatures for the Chechen Wars I did what I have always done in the past ... look for the related Osprey book(s). Unfortunately they don't make any for the Chechen Wars and I haven't found any books that are similar and comprehensive (Histoire and Collections make some outstanding books for other periods, for example). I then searched for images using Google image search. This got me started, but before long I wanted more images and found that the images I got from such searches were of inconsistent quality and attribution (what good is a picture for mini painter if you don't know the date and location that the photo was taken!).
Somehow I stumbled upon stock image sites, sites of companies whose business is selling pictures for publications. I found tons of great photos of good quality with reasonably accurate attribution. My only problem (a slight one) is that such sites hardly ever say what unit a soldier is in and all have some sort of branding embedded in the photo, but all have reasonable size preview images that one can see for free. Mostly by using seven good sites I've found lots of great photos (my collection has 2,500 images for the Chechen Wars for example).
I'm always looking for more searchable, free, stock photo sites, but haven't found a great, complete list of them online. Here are the top seven sites I've found with short descriptions and representative search results. Hopefully this list will be useful to other modern wars mini painters (the more recent the war the more images there seem to be on these sites). Perhaps someone out there knows of another site I should check out?
 | Alamy Stock Photos smaller number of images; company overlay on images is a bit annoying; preview image size (640x451) |
 | Associated Press watermark; smaller preview image size (359x512) |
 | Corbis Images unobtrusive tag, preview image size (640x427) |
 | European Press Photo Agency watermark and tag; large preview image size (800x737) |
 | Getty Images unobtrusive tag; large preview image size (683x1024) |
 | Reuters Images watermark; large preview image size (728x485) |
| Visual RIAN annoying watermark; preview image size (640x392) |
| Chechnya (12/1/1994- 8/31/1996) | Chechnya (8/26/1999- 5/31/2000) | Chechnya (6/1/2000- 4/15/2000) | Yugoslavia (3/31/1991- 11/12/1995) | Sukhumi (1/1/1989- 12/31/1993) | Tbilisi (1/1/1989- 12/31/1993) | Abkhazia (1/1/1989- 12/31/1993) | Transnistria (3/2/1992- 7/21/1992) | Transdniestria (3/2/1992- 7/21/1992) | Moldova (3/2/1992- 7/21/1992) | |
| Alamy | 124 | 126 | 904 | 368 | 20 | 89 | 56 | 7 | 14 | 8 |
| AP | 1039 | 384 | 1665 | 443 | 34 | 145 | 24 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Corbis | 800 | 491 | 1223 | 1907 | 21 | 581 | 74 | 1 | 1 | 7 |
| EPA | 740 | 275 | 2567 | 648 | 31 | 65 | 69 | 0 | 0 | 24 |
| Getty | 843 | 275 | 2459 | 865 | 224 | 175 | 298 | 11 | 0 | 25 |
| Reuters | 453 | 2130 | 1502 | 1965 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| VisualRIAN | 303 | 263 | 601 | 127 | 32 | 581 | 39 | 4 | 6 | 33 |
| The above results are meant to show how many pictures would be found at each site by using the given term and the date range specified. Some duplicates will be returned at each site as images can be found with multiple terms. Duplicates can be found between sites, but for the most part images appear to be unique to each site. Hopefully the above results give some idea of what can be found. | ||||||||||
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