If youâre a frequent reader of our website, youâve probably noticed that we use stock photos on a regular basis. I try my best to find relevant images which will benefit your reading experience. Iâve recently received emails from people asking me where they could find 100% free stock photos for their projects.
Today we gathered a solid collection of royalty free image websites. As bloggers, designers, students, teachers, and business owners we need stock images to make our life easier. Paying every single time you need a royalty free image is a pain in the butt. Fortunately there are tons of online resources that allow you to save money while receiving some of the best stock photos on the web. They say âThe best things in life are free.â I absolutely agree.
Before jumping into the list, I must say that search.creativecommons.org is very helpful for beginners. If you donât want to worry about bookmarking or keeping track of the websites listed below, then by all means go ahead and use this as your number one tool for finding free photos for commercial use.
To help you find royalty free images, weâve collected a few prominent resources you should consider visiting. Every single site mentioned below allows you to use their images 100% free for personal projects. If youâre planning to use an image for commercial purposes, be sure to fully read the license and rules the author of the photo provides.
Public Domain Images
All public domain images can be used for commercial purposes. Please be careful not to use photos containing logos and products which you have no rights to.
Here are some great public domain photo websites.
Note:Â
During my research, I came across many âfree-stock-photoâ sites. Not wanting to confuse you with 40-100 different websites, I decided to eliminate the low quality resources and only mention the best websites. I hope youâll find this collection useful, good luck!
1. Everystockphoto
Everystockphoto.com is a search engine dedicated to finding free photos. To make your life easier, they index and search millions of freely licensed photos across the web. The website is very straight forward. Simply search for a unique keyword, and you will be presented with related search results. Once you find an image you like, be sure to read the license terms located in the right sidebar.
2. Stock.XCHNG
Stock.xchng is probably the most talked about resource for downloading royalty free images. Nonetheless from time to time, people ignore the fact that you have to read the license terms presented with the images. The license usage is located in the right sidebar in the âPhoto detailsâ widget. What I love most about SXC, is that itâs fast, stable, and secure. Searching for images is fairly straightforward and their unique community is constantly active. The website contains over 350,000 quality stock photos from 30,000+ photographers.
3. Freedigitalphotos
Freedigitalphotos.net provides free and premium stock photos. Their free image download requires you to acknowledge that the image youâre using is from them. The free image sizes usually range from 400 x 250-400px. Technically their domain name is misleading. However if youâre running a website and need small thumbnails for your website, Freedigitalphotos.net is a great resource.
4. Unsplash
Unspash was created by pickcrew.com, which is an online marketplace for creative talent. On the website you will be able to download high resolution images and do whatever you want with them. They tend to publish 10 new photos every 10 days. Iâve been using a few of their images for some of our articles on the site.
5. Pixabay
Pixabay is your worry free source for high quality free images. They only publish public domain images. This means that whenever you download an image from their website, you donât have to worry about reading licenses. Every single image on the website can be used in digital and printed format, for personal and commercial use, without attribution.
6. Compfight
Compfight is a bit different. Compfight is an image search engine using the Flickr API. Itâs ideal for people who are searching for inspiration based on keywords. I searched for cars, and received a visually pleasing page of results. If you wish to download images free for commercial use, you can easily do so by clicking on the commercial tag in the left sidebar. I found that most of the images require an attribution.
7. Openphoto
Created in 1998 by Michael Jastremski, Openphoto is a niche photo platform for artists, developers, teachers, and students. Every single image on the site has some sort of Creative Commons licensing. Be sure to read the usage conditions before you download.
8. Morguefile
Morguefile was created by Michael Connors in 1996. The website contains over 216,558 free photos. Just like Pixabay, Morguefile allows you to download royalty free images to use in creative projects. Please keep in mind that their portfolio section contains copyrighted images, so be sure to only use the free photo section. If you do decide to download from the portfolio section, you must read the creative commons license.
9. PicJumbo
Picjumbo was created by Viktor Hanacek. The site offers free photos for your commercial and personal projects. Since Nov 3, 2013 his website has grown to over 600,000 pageviews a month. You donât need to provide an attribution, however it would be nice if you could. Picjumbo also offers a premium membership where you will receive exclusive hi-res photos every single month.
10. Death to the stock photo
Deathtothestockphoto.com is a project by Allie Lehman and David Sherry. Theyâve teamed up together to provide free monthly photos for creatives. You can use these photos for commercial and personal purposes. All you have to do is sign up to their mailing list and you will receive a .ZIP file every month packed with fresh images.
11. New Old Stock
Created by Cole Townsend, New Old Stock is your number one souce for vintage photos. Every single picture you see on the site is free of copyright restrictions.
12. Free Photos by Liam McKay
The beautiful photos youâll find on this site are 100% free. You can do whatever you want with them.
13. Im Free
Imcreator.com allows people to create simple and elegant websites with their stress free builder. To help their users even more, they decided to launch a dedicated section of free resources. Apart from templates and icons, most of those resources are high quality photos. You can use these photos for commercial purposes, however most of their images require an attribution.
14. Little Visuals
Little Visuals is a minimal website that provides 7 free images every 7 days.
15. Superfamous
Superfamous is an LA based design studio of Dutch designer Folkert Gorter. The photos you will find on his website are all under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. As long as you provide credit you can use the images for commercial and personal purposes.
16. Gratisography
Gratisography provides free high-res images for your personal and commercial projects. New images are usually added on a weekly basis, so be sure to check back often.
17. Splitshire
Splitshire provides delicious stock photos for personal and commercial use. The site is managed by graphic designer and photographer Daniel Nanescu.
18. The Pattern Library
The Pattern Library was created by Tim Holman and Claudio Guglieri. The goal of this website is to provide you with breath taking patterns to use freely in your designs.
19. Snapographic
Snapographic was created by Thomas Muhl to offer public domain photos to the world. You can download each image individually, or if you wish to save time, you can download all of the images in a single .ZIP file for a price of a coffee.
20. Jay Mantri
Jay Mantri offers 7 new photos every Thursday. Youâre free to do anything with the images.
21. Lifeofpix
Free high resolution photos free of copyright restrictions. New images are added weekly.
22. Free Stock Photos Subreddit
This new subreddit is solely dedicated to providing you with free high quality stock photos. So if youâve got some good photos to giveaway, you should post them here.
23. Fancy Crave
I recently started Fancy Crave to give away some of my images. I will be updating this site on a weekly basis, so be sure to check back often. You can use there images for your personal and commercial projects. No strings attached. If you can, and attribution would be nice. I hope youâll find them useful. Cheers!
24. Lock and Stock Photos
Created by Aj Montpetit, Lock & Stock Photography aims to provide free images under the Creative Commons License ShareAlike 4.0.
25. Good Free Photos
Good Free Photos is a gallery of thousand of free public domain photos. All of the photos are neatly categorized to make your life easier.
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