6 Sites With Free Stock Images For Your Commercial And Personal Projects
Looking for the right images for your website, blog or social media can be tough. You have to find a perfect combination of high quality, suitable license terms, and a good price. We created a list of sites with amazing free stock images to help make your content more engaging and dynamic!
Visual content is a powerful tool. Just adding an image to a Facebook post can double an engagement rate (source: HubSpot). But finding legal high-quality pictures for your website, social media, etc. is not that easy. We are all familiar with plastic (and costly) stock photos with people faking emotions. Thankfully, high quality doesn't mean a high price. Here are 6 of the sites with free stock images available for commercial use.
To better help you evaluate the websites, we searched 'home office' on each of the platforms.
Unsplash
Unsplash offers over 0.5 million artsy and stylish photos under its own license. Created by a freelance platform Crew (currently being a part of Dribbble) as a humble Tumblr blog, Unsplash has grown into a large visual community. Pictures are grouped into topics. Narrow your search results with orientation and color filters or check out one of 200,000 contributors’ portfolio pages if you like some artist’s particular style.
Membership Required: No.
High Resolution: Yes.
License details: Photos are released under the Unsplash License with no attribution required. You can use them in any commercial project except for the creation of a competing website.
Special features: Many applications like Sketch, Figma, Zoom, Medium, and others are powered by Unsplash API.
Pexels
Pexels, owned by a reputable online design platform Canva, provides both photos and videos for free. The content is either submitted by the creators or aggregated from other photo sites. All of the photos are tagged to make them easy to search.
Membership required: No.
High Resolution: Yes.
License Details: Pexels License allows for photos and videos modification, commercial and personal use, and doesn’t require attribution.
Special features: Video library and a variety of extra tools, such as MS Office Add-In, mobile apps, and a Photoshop plugin.
Pixabay
Pixabay has a varied gallery of over 1 million free crowdsourced photos and videos. The best things about it are a variety of search filters and content curation. A professional photographer and image editor reviews new images and videos, evaluating quality, tags, and legal validity.
Membership required: No.
High resolution: Yes.
License Details: Images are licensed under the terms similar to Creative Commons Zero (CC0). The agreement enables commercial use for digital and print, with no attribution required.
Special features: Video library, high-level content curation. Pixabay also hosts vectors and digital illustrations.
Burst
Burst is a source of free stock images by ecommerce platform Shopify. They have a big collection of thousands of modern images sourced from hired photographers and user submissions. Pictures cover different commercial topics from fashion to technology. Burst specializes in trending images suitable for small businesses’ websites and marketing campaigns.
Membership required: No.
High resolution: Yes.
License details: They work with both Creative Commons Zero (CC0) and their own custom license. The Burst license has a compiling restriction but allows using photos in products for resale.
Special features: Have a look at Burst’s Business Ideas section to find some cool business ideas and high-resolution image kits.
PicJumbo
PicJumbo is a website created by a pro stock photographer Viktor Hanacek that hosts a small library of free high-quality images by the owner himself. Pictures cover multiple popular themes.
Membership required: No.
High resolution: Yes.
License details: Creative Commons Zero (CC0) enables free usage for commercial projects.
Special features: Models in the images are purposefully unrecognizable which spares you from any possible Sensitive Use clauses issues. This restriction prevents users from using a stock image in a way that discredits models.
Everypixel
Everypixel is a great time-saving tool for finding free images. It is an AI-powered search engine that aggregates photos from multiple free stock image sources, including some of the listed above. You can search across all of them at once. Set the image type, orientation, color, and free areas position filters to find exactly what you're looking for.
Membership required: No.
High resolution: Yes.
License details: Images in the Free images section are under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license therefore being safe for commercial use.
Special features: Customized filters help to refine the search queries. An AI algorithm curates photographs and puts the best search results forward.
One More Thing Before You Start
Before you dive into one of these sources there is one important thing left to say. Most of the photos from these websites are free from copyright restrictions or fall under creative commons public domain license. However, it is better to check if your chosen photos require attribution. If you have any doubts, try contacting the platform directly.