If you’ve ever needed a good stock photography for your website, blog, newsletter, poster, or anything else, you’ve probably realized how many sites out there that charge a lot of money to upload a single photo.
Of course, if you want really high quality stock photos on a regular basis, subscribing to one of these sites is probably worth it, but if you only need a couple of images once or twice a year, why pay that much? There are many free stock photography sites out there that have large enough collections that you will probably find what you are looking for.
In this article, I’ll list seven of my favorites that I use for my own blogs as well as for my clients. If you have a favorite free photography site listed here, let us know in the comments. You can also find articles on the Internet such as “50 Free Stock Photography Sitesâ€, but many of them have very small collections. I try to stick to a couple where more images can be found.
All of these sites use a Creative Commons CC0 license, which means you can upload images and use them for personal or commercial purposes without attribution. That’s cool!
Pixels
Pexels is my favorite site for finding free stock photos. All images are very high resolution, which means you can use them for really giant prints if you want.
Most of the files are over 10 MB! Plus, you get information about each photo, such as which camera was used to take it and which software was used to edit it.
Pixabay
There are over 1 million images on Pixabay that you can download for free. What I love about Pixabay is that they have some better search options than Pexels You can search by media type, orientation, category, color and size.
Alternatively, you can get fancy and use the AND, OR, and NOT operators to create very specific searches. Pixabay‘s resolution isn’t as high as Pexels, but it’s still good enough for most web and print needs.
Stuxnap.A.
StockSnap.io is similar to Pexels in terms of very high resolution images, but has fewer images overall. They also have search options, but mostly by date, trends, views, downloads, and favorites.
This allows you to quickly find the most popular photos. You can also click on the category page to view the images. If you want really high resolution images, this site is another good option.
Unsplash
Unsplash and the last two sites I mentioned have much smaller collections than the sites I listed above. You won’t find that many images and that variety, but the images themselves are still very good quality.
On Unsplash, you can also get detailed information about each shot (camera model, shutter speed, focal length, ISO, etc.) if you’re interested.
NegativeSpace
NegativeSpace has just over a thousand free stock photos, but the image quality and resolution are very good. There are not many search options or information about photos, probably because there are not many images on them.
Photos freely
Freely Photos is another small site with a couple of hundred free images that you can use. The photos are slightly different from the photos on other sites, so if you are looking for something more unique, this site may be useful to you.
Makerbook
Makerbook is a stock photography site that features images specifically for startups. So, if you need stock photos for your new startup and want to look cool and trendy, then this is a good site to visit. They don’t have many images, but all of the ones they do have are made for startups.
As I said, there are many other free photography sites out there, but these are the main ones that I love because I can actually find something useful. Remember, you can use all the images from these sites however you want without worrying about getting permission. Enjoy!
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