Perhaps you’re finding it difficult to access free stock photos for your personal or commercial use, not to worry, this article will bring to your notice, the best free stock photo sites.
Whether you’re building a business website, creating a print brochure, crafting a digital or magazine ad, or some other brilliant creative project, you know that a great image helps your content transcend “good” and become “great.”
Compelling, eye-catching, attention-grabbing work on the web especially needs sharp, arresting visual images to succeed.
Thankfully, there’s been a growing number of websites with beautiful stock photography popping up all over the web. Best of all, they’re free!
Photography has always been a dazzling part of the design. Unfortunately, we’ve grown addicted to seeing nice stock images of people and things. Not only are a lot of these stock photos appealing, but they also cost a lot of money. To help solve this, we’ve curated a list of exceptional websites for free stock photos.
See the table of contents below.
What Are Stock Photos?
Stock photos are photographs that are already taken, edited, and ready to be used. But are stock images free to use? Of course, a good number of them are free to use while some are placed on a fee.
The photographer or author of a stock photo makes it available for free or licensing, meaning you can either get it for free or pay a fee to get the right to use it in your designs legally.
Stock images are not just for photographs, you can find illustrations and vector files, plus video clips, soundtracks, and more.
In a few lines to come, we’ll be listing the best free stock photo sites all to your admiration.
Best Free Stock Photo Sites
Here’s a list of the best free stock photos websites:
1. StockSnap.io
StockSnap.io has a large selection of beautiful free stock photos and high-resolution images. The site also has a very handy search feature making it easy to browse through the thousands of images available. In addition, the site tracks views and downloads so you can find the most popular photos available.
StockSnap.io curates only the highest quality images from a huge pool of submissions, then makes it easy to download and use, entirely for free.
StockSnap adds hundreds of images on a daily basis and all photos are released under creative commons public domain – no attribution required.
SEE ALSO: How to Make Money as a Photographer | 20 Easy Ways
2. Pexels
Pexels provides high-quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable, and also easy to discover through their discover pages.
All photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by our users or sourced from free image websites. They ensure all published pictures are high-quality and licensed under the Pexels license.
READ ALSO: 21 Ways To Get Paid To Take Photos [$100+] | 2022
3. Unsplash
Unsplash offers a large collection of free high-resolution photos and has become one of the best sources for stock images. The Unsplash team combs through new submissions and features the very best photos on their homepage. All photos are released for free under the Unsplash license.
On Unsplash, you can find over 2 million freely usable high-resolution images brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.
4. Reshot
Reshot is a free stock photo site where you’ll find hand-picked free stock photos you won’t find elsewhere. Built for startups, freelancers & makers who are sick of tacky stock photos. Feel free to use images on reshot personally or commercially without fear of attribution.
5. Pixabay
Pixabay offers a large collection of free stock photos, vectors, and art illustrations. All photos are released under Creative Commons CC0.
This free stock image website is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright-free images, videos, and music. All contents are released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist – even for commercial purposes.
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6. Gratisography
Gratisography offers free high-resolution pictures you can use on your personal and commercial projects. New awesome pictures are added weekly and are free of copyright restrictions. All pictures are captured by Ryan McGuire of Bells Design.
The self-acclaimed world’s quirkiest collection of high-resolution free stock images, promises to offer the world’s best, most creative pictures — images you just won’t find anywhere else all for free.
7. Freestocks.org
Freestock.org offers a wide range of high-quality photos all released under Creative Commons CC0. Freestocks.org images are not your cliché free stock images worn out a long time ago but rather a source of photos that are fresh, up-to-date, and versatile in style so that they are fit for everybody’s everyday use as well as for more complex and specified projects.
8. FreeImages
FreeImages provides over 300,000 free stock images under its own license. The license allows a very broad range of uses.
Freeimages was launched in February 2001 as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work.
The site has evolved into the massive community you see today — there are over 2,500,000 registered users and around 400,000 photos online.
9. Canva
Canva is an online graphic design tool that also offers free stock photos. One advantage of using Canva is that you can quickly turn an image into a custom graphic to use on social media or your blog.
Launched in 2013, Canva empowers everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere.
10. Picography
Picography contains beautiful free stock photos submitted by Dave Meier and various other photographers. All photos are released under Creative Commons CC0.
This free stock image site has been providing stunning images to millions of people since 2017.
11. Picjumbo
picjumbo is a free stock photo site created in 2013 by designer & photographer Viktor Hanacek.
Also. Picjumbo is a collection of totally free photos for your commercial & personal works. New photos are added daily from a wide variety of categories including abstract, fashion, nature, technology, and much more.
12. Burst
Burst is a free stock photo platform that is powered by Shopify. Their image library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images that were shot by our global community of photographers.
13. The Jopwell Collection
The Jopwell Collection contains several albums with hundreds of images featuring people in the Jopwell community. The images are free to be downloaded and used as long as photo credit goes to Jopwell.
14. Crello
Just like Canva, Crello is a free graphic design tool where you can create designs and find free stock images for use.
15. iStock
iStock by Getty Images has grown from a 6-person start-up to become a global player in the stock media industry with hundreds of employees and over 160,000 global contributors. As a brand, iStock stands for creativity and generosity by making available free stock photos for general use.
iStock releases a new batch of free stock files every week when you sign up for a free membership.
16. New Old Stock
New Old Stock is a collection of vintage photos from the public archives, free of known copyright restrictions.
17. Google Advanced Image Search
Google Advanced Image Search is a method of finding free-to-use images through Google’s own search tools.
Just type your search query – and watch free image results pop up. Here’s a quick guide.
18. Freepik.com
On freepik.com, you can find the best high-quality content: illustrations, photos, icons, mockups, and presentation templates all for free.
19. ISO Republic
ISO Republic provides high-quality free stock photos and video under a generous CC0 license. There are no restrictions. You can freely download, use on both personal and commercial projects, edit or share, and do so without permission or attribution to the creator of the work.
Their mission is to offer highly curated collections of stock images and videos that you can use both personally and commercially. Learn more about their license.
20. Lifeofpix
LifeofPix lists free high-resolution photographs and partners with Adobe Stock for more (paid) stock photographs.
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re building a brand new website for your business or creating a blog about your personal life, you’re going to need images. To spare you the cost of spending to get stock photos, this article carefully outlines the best free stock photo websites for personal and commercial use.
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