Introduction
Using stock photography for your projects can be expensive. Thankfully, there are websites offering millions of high-quality stock images for free. So coming up in this top 10, we’ll guide you the best free stock photo sites to download royalty-free images for use on your website, blog, YouTube, or any other project you’re working on. The sites mentioned won’t be in any order, but of course, we’ll save the best for last. Let’s get started!
1. Adobe Stock Free Collection
Up first, in no particular order, is the Adobe Stock Free Collection from the folks not known for giving away free stuff. Adobe now offers hundreds of thousands of images, videos, and vectors for free for both personal and commercial use in their Adobe Stock Collection. At this time, there are more than 500,000 free stock photos to choose from. One is available for free on a rotating basis, so what you see for free in the future may change. After doing a search, you’ll find handy filters on the left to narrow down the selection. After selecting a photo, below the image you’ll see the dimensions, file type, category, and license type. As mentioned in an earlier video regarding free stock video websites, you’ll want to pay attention to the license details for this one. It’s a standard license. This is the most common license type you’ll see in the Adobe Stock Free Collection. This license gives you a good amount of permissions with very few exceptions.
2. Stock Snap
Up next, Stock Snap is a website created by the popular graphic design software company Snappa. Here on Stock Snap, you’ll find an interesting selection of high-quality images to choose from, with new photos being added each week. Searching on here is easy, but when gathering resources for a project, I’d recommend checking out their popular category section. You just might find the category you’re looking for for your current project or inspiration for a future project. On the site, all photos carry the Creative Commons CC0 license. This one offers generous terms, letting you use the images for personal and commercial use. No attribution is required, which in simple terms means that you do not have to give credit to the photographer.
3. Pexels
Pexels, which has only been around since 2015, is now one of the most popular websites for free stock photos. They offer hundreds of thousands of high-quality photos uploaded by their users. You’ll also find images on here that are sourced from other free photo websites. Prior to downloading any image, they give you the choice of selecting the size that you want. They also let you enter a custom size that might work better for your project. On a side note, as mentioned in our video discussing free stock video sites, Pexels also has a fantastic selection of free stock videos in both HD and 4K. Whether you’re downloading photos or videos, Pexels’ license is as simple as it gets with very few restrictions.
4. Burst
Burst is a resource from Shopify created to help entrepreneurs make better marketing materials for their business. What’s great is that you don’t have to have a Shopify account to use Burst to download any free images from their site. All photos available are offered in both low and high resolution, depending on whether you’re just adding images to a website or working on a graphic design project. Just like the previous site mentioned, they offer popular collections of their images that might come in handy with one of your projects. Some of the photos on Burst will carry the Creative Commons CC0 license, while others are protected with their own photo license.
5. Freerange
Next up is Freerange. You would think with that name it would be a site about freerange chickens, but it’s not. It’s another great site that should be bookmarked for those times you need to gather images for a project. They have thousands of images created from in-house photographers along with photos created by outside contributors that you won’t find anywhere else. To download on this site, you will need an account and be logged in. You’ll have a few download options, and to edit the image, it can be sent to Pixlr, which many of you know is an excellent online image editor. Many of the images on Freerange carry the Equal license along with many that fall under the Creative Commons CC0 license, which I mentioned earlier.
6. Unsplash
Next up is Unsplash. Being one of the most well-known free stock photo sites, they offer more than 3 million high-resolution images submitted by talented photographers. After doing a search, it’ll display all the photos based on the search term. What is useful if you’re working on a project is to select collections in the upper left. This will show you the collections of images based on the search term you entered. After selecting an image, clicking in the drop-down menu in the upper right next to Download Free gives you various choices for the size of the photo you’d like to download. At one time, Unsplash was completely free. Right now, some of the images are locked behind a paywall unless you upgrade to Unsplash Plus. Published photos on here have the Unsplash License. They’re available for both commercial and non-commercial use. No attribution is required.
7. Kaboom Pics
All right, we’re going to blow things up with Kaboom Pics. While they don’t offer the largest selection of those mentioned, what they do have available is of high quality. After doing a search, there are filters to change the orientation and a handy color palette to find images using that color. One downside to using the site is it has more ads than most of the other free photo sites. All images on Kaboom Pics fall under their own license. They’re all free for non-commercial and commercial use. Attribution is not required and can be modified however you want.
8. Stock Vault
Stock Vault is another website focused on quality, not quantity. With around 140,000 images on their site, the photos are well curated with new images added each day. When looking for inspiration for a project, their Free Stock Collections is a great place to go to find new photos. Stock Vault offers three different license types: non-commercial, commercial, and Creative Commons CC0. Look below Free Download for additional information about an image, including the license type.
9. Wikipedia Commons
From the creators of Wikipedia, we also have another site called Wikipedia Commons that often gets overlooked. They now have more than 98 million images, videos, and sounds on their site. What you’ll find on here is a good variety of new and old images. Some are very high quality, while others are not but still worth checking out. Some of the media on here is in the public domain, and you’ll find various types of licenses on the site. To find the license type for an image, scroll down. This will show you the license type along with an abbreviated summary of the license.
10. Pixabay
Over the years, Pixabay is the freest stock photo website we’ve used the most. They now have over 4 million high-quality free stock photos along with music and videos. After doing a search at the top, you can filter by photos, illustrations, vectors, or another media type, orientation, size, color, and publish date. Prior to downloading, they’ll give you various sizes to choose from to fit your needs. On Pixabay, all of the photos and other media are released under their own license. All content can be used free for personal and commercial use. No attribution is required, and content can be modified or adapted into new works.