10 of the best websites for free stock photos
A picture is worth a thousand words. Creating and using visual content in marketing is critical when attracting attention and creating emotional connection between your brand and target audience. In fact, visual content gets 94% more views and readers are 80% more likely to read content where visuals are involved.
One of the key reasons why we respond to images is that they affect us on a certain emotional and personal level, which explains why content with visuals in more engaging and interesting, compared to plain written word.
But stock photography can be expensive. So, we put together a list of our favourite websites for free, high quality stock photos for your next project:
1. Pexels
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Pexels license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through the discover pages. There are hundreds of thousands free stock photos and every day new high resolution photos will be added. All photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by users or sourced from free image websites.
2. Pixabay
Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images and videos. All contents are released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist. You can copy, modify, distribute, and use the images, even for commercial purposes, all without asking for permission or giving credits to the artist.
3. Rawpixel
Rawpixel is smashing stereotypes to create design resources that reflect today’s society as it really is. To achieve this, the team is exploring new ways to express concepts with creativity and authenticity. Having some of the most diverse stock photos in the industry, Rawpixel believes that they can make a positive social impact on the world around us - they partner with Hope for children to help empower children around the world to fulfill their potential.
4. Life of Pix
Life of Pix provides free high-resolution photos with no copyrights restrictions for personal and commercial use. All images are donated to the public domain, however there is no mass distribution allowed. Distributors are allowed to repost a maximum of 10 images without the written Life of Pix consent.
5. Stocksnap
Stocksnap offer beautiful, high quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of - including commercial usage - for free. They curate only the highest quality images from a huge pool of submissions, then make them available for browsing, download and use, entirely for free.
6. Unsplash
Over 1 million free high-resolution images brought to you by a generous community of photographers. Unsplash is home to a growing community of photographers—from hobbyists, professionals, emerging brands and everyone in between. They hand-select every photo and accept only the best, so that no matter what you need—you’ll find exactly what you’re looking for. With partners like BuzzFeed, Squarespace and Trello being powered by their API, the Unsplash library is more widely accessible than ever.
7. Picjumbo
Picjumbo is a free stock photo site created in 2013 by designer & photographer Viktor Hanacek. It all started when all regular stock photo sites rejected his photos due to "lack of quality". Two years later, people have downloaded more than 2,500,000+ pictures from Picjumbo and now it's one of the best sites with free stock photos featured in the biggest online publications.
A quirky collection of free high-resolution pictures. All completely free to download without copyright restrictions. They are not after quantity. In fact, they are pretty choosy when it comes to the images they publish. Gratisography curates only the most interesting pictures, the ones with a personality, a perspective and a story to tell.
9. Burst
Burst is a free stock photo platform that is powered by Shopify. The image library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images that were shot by a global community of photographers. Burst provides designers, developers, bloggers and entrepreneurs with access to beautiful free stock photography. You can use the pictures for just about anything — your website, blog or online store, school projects, Instagram ads, facebook posts, desktop backgrounds, client work and more. All photos are free for commercial use with no attribution required.
10. Kaboom Pics
You can download and use any pictures for your own purposes - grace your blog posts, create lovely graphics for your social media accounts, make your website more appealing - all for free, including the commercial use. Their blog blog is also packed with important knowledge that can help you create your own brand, but also full of interesting facts about the photography, reports from our photographic adventures, and more.
