A country flag image could be used for any number of reasons; perhaps the most popular method would be on a website which allows the user to either select the language of their choice or to access the site-version dedicated to their country. The problem is that there are many, many sites where you can download and use the national flag image of your choice, but the most of these are pretty bland and basic and don’t really offer the graphical expectations of modern web design. We want better.

An excellent substitute for flag images would be to use one of the, sadly so few, professionally designed country flag icon-sets that are freely available. And that is what we have found for you today:

Flags Icons by IconDrawer

This set by IconDrawer, consists of 278 free flag icons representing countries and unions from all over the world. They are all in .png format and sized at: 16×16px, 24×24px, 32×32px and 48×48px.

Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set + Flag Icons

This icon set, from Smashing Magazine, is a huge collection of icons that focus on web design: web application icons, user interface icons, e-commerce icons,blog icons, smiley icons, button icons, keyboard icons and, of course, national flags icons. There are a total of 94 flag icons in the set.

famfamfam Flag Icons

There 247 icons in the “Flags” icon set from famfamfam, in .gif and .png formats and all representing most countries in the world as small pixel icons.

Free Country Flag Icons

There are 37 country flag icons in this set, they are rendered at 256×256px, 128×128px, 64×64px, 48×48px, 32×32px and 16×16px and come in .png, .ico and ,icns formats.

172 Final Flag Icons

There are 172 icons in this set, they render at 256×256px, 128×128px, 64×64px, 48×48px, 32×32px, 24×24px and 16×16 pixels and are .png, .ico and .icns formats.

Flags of the World Icons

Flags of the World is a collection of 18x12px icons in .gif format.

Phoca World Flag Icon

Phoca World Flag Icon set includes 252 icons in .gif and .png formats. They are sized at 16x12px and 22x14px.

Country Flag Icons for iPhone Maps

The Country Flag Icons for the iPhone come in .png, .ico and .icns formats. Available sizes include: 256×256px, 128×128px, 64×64px, 48×48px, 32×32px and 16×16px. There are 230 country icons in the set.

Flags of all Countries – National Flag Icons

The National Flag Icons are a collection of 250 individual icons, in .png format and sized at 48x48px, 32x32px and 16x16px.

Flag Favicons

These basic (and slightly old-fashioned) world flag icons were created many years ago when the standard color and size formats recommended were 16 colors and 16X16 respectively. They come in .ico format and are sized at 16x16px.

Flag Icons Search Engine

flag.redpixart.com is a flag icon search engine that has high quaility icons of more than 190 countries. Each icon has serval file formats, such as PNG, GIF and JPG, and you can browse and download them for either Windows, Macintosh or Linux Systems.

50 iPhone Styled Flag Buttons

Flag Button Devkit from Bartelme Design

This is a Photoshop and Illustrator development kit for creating flag buttons. After downloading the kit, to create a new button, just duplicate a layer group and paste the new flag into the respective layer. It’s as simple as that.

Flag Creator PSD