Images in iWork with Transparent Background: Where can I find these?

You can use the Instant Alpha feature to remove unwanted backgrounds on images found online or images from your photos or graphics that you've placed into Pages. You'll find it under Format in the menu bar. You can also set the word wrap in the inspector to overlay into that space that is not transparent.

Select the image.
1.Choose Format > Instant Alpha.
2.Click the color you want to make transparent, and then drag slowly over it.
3.As you drag, the selection grows to include the contiguous area that uses similar colors. You can control how much of the image is selected by dragging less or more.
Repeat step 3 as many times as you like.

The Instant Alpha feature, which is Leopard only I believe, in most instances will not get you perfect results. The edges will be rough unlike the nice smooth examples Apple offers.

To get professional results you will need some skill, time and a professional quality program.

There are libraries of material available at economical subscription services such as iStockPhoto [http://www.istockphoto.com] or Shutterstock [http://www.shutterstock.com>. The professional libraries cost far more. iStockPhoto's quality is very high even though they are cheap. They both offer regularly some free samples.

Free legal material IMHO is usually bad although there are exceptions. There are plenty of PC oriented sites which are full of junk that you tend to see from one site to the other.

Wikipedia also has an opensource photo and clipart service.

There are as usual, plenty of free pirated sites as well.

Search for "ClipArt".

With photographic material the effect you want is called "deep etched" ie all the background material has been removed to leave all but the central figure transparent. This is achieved with a professional program such as Photoshop or good quality shareware like Pixelmator and requires some skill and time.

Drawn material (vector graphics) is by nature easier to get this effect. It is usually created using applications such as Illustrator or Inkscape (freeware). Both of which can convert open source .svg graphics into the more useful .pdf format. There are free open source libraries of .svg graphics. [www.openclipart.org] has all its material downloadable as a very large CD size archive or you can choose individual pieces.

Just remember you will have to convert from the .svg format to .pdf to use them in Pages.

The other common format which Apple has mostly made outdated is .eps files. Pages and Preview will automatically convert these into .pdf files for internal use. These may or may not have a white background around them, depending on how they were created. Mostly however they lose this white background upon conversion. Just open them in Preview and resave them. As a bonus they will preview nicely in Finder's Coverflow and be substantially smaller in size.

Instant Alpha is Pages 3 and works in Tiger. The cleanness depends somewhat on the nature of the particular image or graphic, though of course Photoshop, etc, will always do better. No argument there.

Walt