Images are a great source of grabbing visitors' attention and lead them to trigger the most instantaneous response that you want them. Images can conv...
Images are a great source of grabbing visitors' attention and lead them to trigger the most instantaneous response that you want them. Images can convert visitors into loyal customers or give them reasons to come back again. Don't believe it? let me give you a reason. We are one of the best web template providers in the industry. We find most of our Joomla templates and WordPress themes are the best selling compared to the entire templates and themes in our directory. Later we found aesthetic visual content is driving the sales wheels more than our expectations.
So, we can say images can express a thousand words within a single appearance. It not only tells its audience what you precisely want to tell them but also breathes life to your website and help to accelerate your conversion wheel. A research shows that images increase trust, CTA (click-through rate), website traffic, and conversion rate. Another research was conducted by HubSpot images in digital media and among the results were a few key nuggets like the fact that photos on Facebook generate 53% more likes and 104% more comments than the average post.
You know images are important. Now the question where do you find the best free stock photo sites, quality images that cleared to use for your blog post, social media contents and in the section essential for your website?
The answer is sad but true, almost all of the best stock photo sites are projected by copyright. Even nearly every image created in the last 30 years is still protected by copyright—a protection that gives virtually every author the exclusive right to use or reproduce their work. But don't be frustrated, you can find a public domain photo, use a Creative Commons image that might need attribution or even create your own image from scratch. Let's explore some of the best free stock photo websites below given.
(Note: I've tried to showcase the free stock photo websites, but before using the image check their license, It could be changed by author anytime.)
Freepik
Freepik is an incredible source for downloading FREE stock photos and free templates to make stunning designs with an online editing tool. The advantage of Freepik is that you can also create content and sell it on Freepik. Freepik has fresh content and access to thousands of images and designs ready to publish. They have categories for different stock photos; all are the newest and trendiest photos and designs.
Unsplash
Unsplash is one of the top free stock photo sites, contributed by talented people. The photos are easy to download, no tweet, no status, and email subscription required. Just visit the website, scroll to choose your preferred images, and click on the download button. You can also be part of Unsplash, just submit your photo and it will be published after verification of its actuality and quality.
Picjumbo is an outstanding and absolutely free stock image site, available for commercial and personal projects. The source is full of variety of images for countless usage, There in no search area, but comes with an associated category, such as Technology, People, Food and so on. Just visit the picjumbo website, select the relevant category and download your desired images.
Jaymantri is a great source of royalty free and high-resolution images, Every week in Thursday the image directory is updated. No registration, No sign up required. Just subscribe to the weekly update and these make it as one of the best free stock image websites.
Moose
Discover thousands of free stock photos with Moose. Although there are plentiful amounts of premium images, free ones always come first in search results. Find the perfect photo for any project among hundreds of categories, including people, nature, sport, animals, and many more. Linkbacks and attribution are required.
Startup Stock Photos
Startup Stock Photos contain decent, quality and high-resolution photos around the site. If you are a startup, or starter company, want to visually enrich your website or project, Startup Stock Photos provides royalty free photos for promotional, personal and any other commercial purpose. You can all contribute to photos to the community. The guys behind Startup Stock Photos justify your photo quality and publish it.
Magdeline website comes with awesome dark and light layout variation and cool user interface. Magdeline adds high-resolution photo every day on the website under CC0 - PUBLIC DOMAIN. I love their image categorization and searing panel, that allow quick access to your desired images. It is a great source of free stock images.
Stokpic is an incredible source of Unlimited FREE hires stock images that you can do whatever you want with. For both personal and commercial use. The site of stokpic is awesome, categorized image in numbers category and interest. This is an absolutely one of the most popular free stock image sites.
Piography is a well-known source of royalty free photo for using personal or commercial project. The site is the outcome of a deliberative initiative taken by Hidden Depth. The source of image Hidden Depth himself and others contributor for the contents. You can also contribute your images and your image will be approved and featured on picography.co. You will get credit with your nickname and link back to your profile.
ISO Republic has thousands of images and videos available under the Creative Commons CC0 license. You can use the search function or view the categories, which range from Animals to Sport to Technology, to find what you're looking for.
If you're looking for quirky images of clowns, men in rollerskates or someone climbing into a washing machine, look no further! Gratisography is updated weekly and offers a range of images, most of which will have people asking "wait, what?" Though some of the photographs might only be useful for a greeting card in the Humor section, some of these can be suitable for a project when you just can't find a literal image to fit.
Free Range Stock offers thousand of high-quality, high-resolution free photos, available for commercial and non-commercial usage. To download nothing is required other than free registration that is why it is known as one of the best free stock photo sites.
Free Photos Bank comes with a collection of high-resolution free photos, suits to extensive niches. The photos are easy to download and easy to search, no registration, no login required.
Image Free provides free and paid images can be used in corporate, personal and education projects. Free section seems fairly limited and registration required for download free and paid images.
IM Free offers a curated collection of free resources, all for commercial use. Search for a keyword or browse through the stylishly crafted categories
Creative commons Search is not a search engine, but comes with a short of photo search engine clearinghouse, that offers easy access to search provider by the other recognised organisation like Flicker, Fotopedia and Google.
For example, searching for "sky" on Creative Commons Search and selecting Google Images. It will give you image from there. Note CC has no control over the results that are returned. Do not assume that the results displayed in this search portal are under a CC license.
Dreamstime is amazing source of Stock Photos, Images & Video Footage. But most of them are premium. They also provide free images for personal and commercial use, that are available in a free section that's searchable and frequently updated. But Free images are accessible after creating a free account.
FreeDigitalPhotos is a great source of stock photos and illustration, perfectly suited for your online and offline projects, All images are free but free in a conditional criteria. The least sized of images are free, and largest version of image are premium.
Life of pic provides Free high-resolution images/photos for personal & commercial use, new images added weekly. Hand-made with love by Leeroy Advertising Agency in Montreal & its network of photographers. All photos published on Life Of Pix are licensed under Creative Commons Zero which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
SplitShire offers delicious, free stock photos for personal & commercial use. The site is owned and maintained by Daniel Hanescu. Daniel is a web designer, graphic designer and photographer, was looking for some cool photos for projects (and having difficulty). I love the look and feel of the site and particularly the mood of the photos on show.
It first appeared back in 1998, and so it's no surprise that Openphoto has now built up a solid collection of stock photos. They're neatly arranged into well-chosen categories, and clicking any of these leads on to a thumbnail gallery of related shots.
Photoeverywhere provides 1000s of free travel and tourism stock images, instant image download and use on your blog, website or printed material - all at no cost!
Public Domain Pictures is a repository for free public domain images. Download high quality HD photos or upload your own. Make money from your hobby, gain popularity and improve your photographic and graphic skills.
Jeyjoo Gallery provides niche image archive offers high quality free images of a travel and macro photography genre. Jeyjoo are actually a web design company offering absolutely free stock photo downloads for commercial and private use in return for the publicity generated. Link backs and/or author attribution are preferred.
Free images are a friendly community of photography addicts who generously offer their works to those who need them free of charge. The website is considered the largest directory of free stock photos containing 350.000 quality stock photos by more than 30.000 fellow photographers and designers. So visit the website surpass sign-up process and have access to download.
Every week, hundreds of high-resolution photos are added to StockSnap. According to Stocksnap, each one of their images is released under Creative Commons Zero and can be copied, modified and distributed, including images that will be used commercially. No attribution is required. They curate photos from around the web, but also have their own network of talented photographers.
Refe is a marketplace of the best mobile photos. Here are free photos for your personal or commercial projects.
Imagebase is a collection of photos, mostly taken by David Niblack, that can be freely used for personal, commercial, non-profit, artistic, or creative purposes.
The goal of Death to The Stock Photo is to bring you a variety of options that are available for commercial use for your blog posts, social accounts and mockups. Subscribe via e-mail and each month you will be sent a pack of 10 photos all linked to a particular category.
Pexels makes it easy to access databases of hundreds of thousands of high-quality photos. Not only does Pexels pull from its own website that houses images from its team of photographers and community members, it also searches other sites, including Pixabay and Gratisography. The images can be modified and used for commercial and non-commercial purposes. Attribution is not mandatory.
Travel Coffee Book is a great site if you are looking for landmarks and scenery photos. All images are available under Creative Commons Zero. The tool can also work as a photo management tool where you can also submit your own travel photos to the website.
Deviantart comes with tons of royalty free images under numerous category, that easily suits your need. Here are the categories - Art, Digital Art, Photography, Traditional Art, Community Art, Contemporary Art, Modern Art, Skins, Themes, Poetry, Prose, Applications, Wallpappers, Online Art, graphic Design, web Design, gaming, photography, animation, comic Books, digital Images.
Shopify offers Burst, which is a royalty-free provider for high-resolution photos. Anybody has permission to modify the images in any way and use for commercial purposes. Not only is there a search feature, but the website also offers a good representation of different areas and topics, and the categories are useful when you are not sure what you are looking for.
NegativeSpace provides images that work around a common theme of a central focus point with blurred surroundings. The site is easy to use and even allows you to search for images by color or simply select from one of their categories. The images can be used based on the Creative Commons CC0 license.
Free Refe Real Life Photos is by GetRefe.com, a site that offers royalty-free images. All photos are free and have a range of themes and imagery.
This site currently contains more than 2500 files, 6GB of free abstract digital photos, backgrounds and basic video clips ready for you to download and use. The materials contained here are free to download and use, but you must credit / link to this site if you use them in any commercial application or product. You may not redistribute these photographs as stock for reuse.
Photober is free of charge photo downloading site for personal or commercial use. You can download photos and do nearly whatever you like. Just don't redistribute them or offer image for sale, or offer images as part of printed products. For high res photos you have to contact Photober via their website. A photo credit is appreciated.
Foter is a Flickr-focused search tool that helps quickly unearth photos and identify their licenses.
Reshot touts a free exchange of the "world's best visual content." Per their website, the contributors range "from seasoned pros to those with a newly-discovered creative spark." The images are available for commercial and non-commercial use. In other words, the images include an irrevocable, nonexclusive copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos for free.
Superfamous houses the work of Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter, whose photography is available under the conditions of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means that you can use the work for your own purposes — including commercial use — as long as credit is provided.
Stockvault is a stock photo sharing website where photographers, designers and students can share their photographs, graphics and image files with each other for free and use them for personal and non-commercial design work. No registration is required.
Pixabay offers copyright-free, cost-free images published under Creative Commons. You can copy, modify, distribute and use the images, even for commercial purposes. No registration is required.
Rawpixel claims to have the most diverse collection of stock photos in the industry — and it may be true. They also have vectors, PSD mockups, and public domain content like famous Japanese wood panel prints. Their paid option contributes towards Hope for Children.
Old is gold. New Old stock contain photo old age. The photos from the public archives Free of known copyright restrictions. Car Images.
Just like the web address indicates, Foodiesfeed is great for all kinds of food photos. If you are looking for an image of food, this site is the perfect niche for you. All the photos are free to download and fall under the Creative Commons Zero license.
This mention comes with a bit of sad news. The owner of the site Nic passed away but his photos remain in his memory. All photos that have been posted were released under the creative commons license public domain dedication.
Skitterphoto has added a new image every day since its inception in 2014, so you can do image search to unique high-resolution photos. Skitterphoto images are taken by three photographers and are available under the Creative Commons Zero license. You can find various themes, including landscape, people, transportation, and more.
Free Digital Photos houses a wealth of free images—categorized and searchable—for business, personal or educational use. They're smaller sized, and larger versions are available to purchase. Using the free images often requires a credit to the photographer and the site like the one you see below.
ImageFree's registered users can download both free and paid images to use in corporate and personal projects. The free selection seems fairly limited, though—my "coffee" search didn't turn up a free photo I could use.
Morguefile contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by visitors to the site. A short registration is required, and morguefile asks that users credit the photographer when possible.
Rgbstock is a free stock image site created by photographers and graphic artists. Registration (required) is one-click and the pool of photos is pretty deep.
Ancestry Images offers a free image archive of historical prints, maps and artifact photos, like this print of a New Zealand Maori Warrior from 1817.
BigFoto is a royalty-free photo gallery in which most of the photos have been contributed by amateur photographers. No login is required. It's organized mainly by geographic area—for example, this photo is from the "Copenhagen" collection.
FreeMediaGoo offers royalty-free, cost-free media that can be used in print, film, TV, Internet or any other type of media both for commercial and personal use. There's no login required, but the inventory is slightly more limited, organized into unique categories like "beach backgrounds" and "concrete textures."
Pickupimage is a large collection of free stock images mostly focusing on nature- and outdoor-related scenes that can be copied, modified an distributed—even for commercial purposes. No registration necessary! Since the pool isn't too broad this site didn't pass the "coffee" search, but here's a sample of what you can find there.
Wikimedia Commons is a database of 21,049,775 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. The images are painstakingly organized but the classifications may not be super clear if you're not a big Wikipedia user (I'm not).
Pikwizard offers more than 100,000 free images and over 20,000 of those are exclusive to Pikwizard. According to the website, there are a lot of images of people that are available for download. The images are free to use without attribution.
Google Advanced Image Search is a method of finding free-to-use images through Google's own search tools. Here's a quick guide.
Image Finder allows users to search Creative Commons photos from Flickr with similar filters for commercial/non-commercial and other categories.
You do need to register for an account (also free) to access the images. The images fall under the Royalty Free license, but if you use one of the images, you need to include an image attribution and/or a link back to Stockfreeimages.
StockPhotos.io is a Creative Commons-licensed professional free stock photos sharing community of about 25,000 images. All photos displayed on this Pinterest-esque site are allo4wed for commercial use with proper credits to the authors.
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version.
Wylio is an all-in-one picture finder, re-sizer and attribution builder for bloggers. Users can resize up to 5 free images per month.
Kaboompics provides free stock photos that can be used for both non-commercial and commercial projects. There are thousands of images to choose from and attribution is not required. Images can also be modified.
TurboPhoto provide easy access to download 2,000 (3.4 GB) free stock images from 10 categories (view all thumbnails below). Stock images are in the public domain. For higher quality, professional stock images, use the search bar above to find Turbo Photo images. Visit and subscribe to the Free Images blog.
Free images live is a place where photographers promote their work by supplying free stock photos to designers and creative users.
We function, offers a few photos that are free and worth taking a look at for any project you may be working on. I like a lot of the photos they provide, but I can't say that I've used them a ton in my projects.
If you are building your own site or just need images for any sort of layout, then it's the dimensions that really matter, not what the photo is all about. And Lorem Pixel was made for such "dummy image" needs. The app has a placeholder generator that lets you define the height and width (max: 1920 pixels) of an image, choose a category (abstract, animals, business, cats, city, food, nightlife, fashion, people, nature, sport, technics, transport) and whether you want colour or greyscale. That's it!
iStock releases new a new batch of free stock images every week. (Signup for a free membership—a slightly confusing process—is required.)
Conclusion
We haven't curated images based on it popularity, we just listed out randomly that we use in our daily projects. If you find, I have missed any useful source, comment below. I will added that in the list. Hope, you find the resources helpful.
