Any decent web designer or content creator spends a sizeable amount of their life looking for the perfect images for their sites. High-quality stock photography can easily be accessed online, but often these pictures get very expensive, which can be a hindrance to those operating on a tight budget (or no budget at all). If you’re looking for some professional quality photos, freestocks.org is a good place to begin your search. Freestock’s catalog has been created mainly by three photographers with full-time jobs who create the catalog in their free time. So the offering might not be as large, but it’s completely free, and each photo has clearly been taken by someone who understands lighting, editing, and composition.
Our library is updated on a daily basis so you can find the newest and trendiest photos and designs. From thousands of ready-to-publish images to our online editor, we work to get your project ready double-quick. You won’t find a massive selection at Gratisography, and that’s not what this site is all about. Instead, you’ll find interesting photos that stand out from those at other sites. Although that’s a slight inconvenience, it does allow for your download history to be tracked.
FOCA Stock
It hosts an abundance of brilliant high-resolution photos, vectors, and illustrations, is easy to navigate with high-functioning search features, and best of all – it’s absolutely free. You have the option to either browse as a guest or get a free membership, which will allow you to bypass the Captcha. Most images need no attribution, but make sure you check for each one you use, as there are a few exceptions. Shutterstock is a leading provider of licensed stock images, vectors, illustrations, and music for businesses and consumers around the world. It has a growing community of more than one million creators and adds hundreds of thousands of creative assets every day. Designerspics is a website that offers free high-quality photos for personal and commercial use.
To date, over one billion images, video clips, and music tracks have been downloaded on Shutterstock. Though its business model is to charge for images and videos, it has a library of over 300 million free stock images. Explore this list of the 36 best free stock photo sites and find the perfect fit.
Our Top 10 Free Stock Image Sites for Designers
The site serves as something of a portfolio for professional photographers, so photo attribution is pretty common when using someone’s work, although it’s not required. StockSnap.io is a free stock image site created by the same team behind graphic design tool Snappa. The search function is user friendly and lets you sort by popularity, views, downloads, favorites, and more.
AI is revolutionizing most online spaces, and stock photos are no exception. With the advent of generative AI, it’s possible to feed your exact specifications into an AI image generator like Midjourney and get a unique, often sophisticated, result. The ability to generate fresh new photos that match your exact needs might mean stock photos will soon become a thing of the past. For food bloggers and content creators in the restaurant space, Foodiesfeed is a must-have.
Using free images for your website
They also opened up submissions so other photographers could upload their own free stock photos. The photos on Flickr are known for containing rich metadata, including geolocation information, EXIF data, tags, and more. So if you want to find photos taken in France, select the World Map under the Explore dropdown, and click on one of the pink dots that pop up in that country.
- You won’t find isolated shots, and photos are frequently just a tiny bit lower quality than you’d pay for.
- The site search helps you find photos in over 1,500 collections, with advanced sorting options to find the best match.
- Because creators own the rights to their images, and if you publish one of them without their approval, you may be guilty of copyright infringement.
- Browse curated photo collections of trending themes like Springtime, Nature, and Landscapes.
Stockvault is a website that provides a large collection of free stock photos, graphics, and other digital assets. It was founded in 2004 by a group of photographers and designers who wanted to provide a platform where people could find and use high-quality images for personal and commercial projects. Kaboompics is another popular free stock image site, with more than 20,000 photos. It’s owned by one photographer/entrepreneur and has a stock photo license that covers both personal and commercial purposes without attribution (although it’s appreciated).
Best Free Stock Photo Sites (
Built by the Leeroy creative agency, Life of Pix offers true-to-life high-resolution stock images for download. It has thousands of stock photos, including everything from food and people to architecture and textures. The site regularly adds 10 new photos from a handpicked photographer best stock photography for designers of the week. All copyright-free images are available for commercial use, but some restrictions apply for distributors. Stocksy.com is a website that offers royalty-free stock photos and videos that are high-quality and curated by a community of photographers and artists.
Openverse aims to build a search engine for openly licensed content, including images, audio, and video. The project aims to make it easier for people to find and use openly licensed content, while also helping content creators get more exposure for their work. Pexels offers a large selection of free stock photos and videos, with a focus on nature and outdoor scenes, as well as cityscapes and technology. At the time of writing, they have just under 7 million images, and just under 80,000 contributing photographers.
It’s one of the oldest stock photo archives out there and derives its name from what people in production would call an inactive file—used only for reference. It’s super easy to use and has a great catalog of real everyday sorts of images that you can pull from. Freerange is a standard free stock image site with a library of images ready to download. The collections span topics like backgrounds and textures, animals and insects, technology, and vintage photos.
The website was created to provide a source of free stock photos for personal or commercial use. It features a user-friendly interface that allows users to easily browse and search for images by category or keyword. The images on the site are organized into various categories, such as animals, nature, travel, and more. Piqsels is a website that offers a wide range of high-quality free stock photos and illustrations that can be used for personal or commercial projects without any attribution required. The images on Piqsels are submitted by various photographers and artists from around the world, and cover a diverse range of topics such as nature, food, technology, business, and more.
Share new photos in a Flickr album to your Facebook Page
Anyone who ever wrote, designed, or otherwise contributed to a website or blog knows that having high-quality images available for your content is absolutely crucial. Especially for social media engagement, a well-placed image can do more for you than any amount of SEO optimization, sponsored posts, or razor-sharp copy. Stockvault showcases a big collection of more than 138,000 photos on various topics. It crowdsources photos from creators around the world for you to download and use for free. The only drawback is that Stockvault has three different licenses, so make sure to check that you can use a specific photo for your intended purposes.
