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Finding the right stock photos for your blog banners is essential to creating quality blog posts. Shutterstock offers 10 free high quality images with its free trial offer! These images are not offered on the royalty-free sites.
CASEY BOTTICELLO
Founder, Blogging Guide
Stock images are generic photos, illustrations, and icons created without a particular project in mind. They are then licensed, usually for a hefty fee, to individuals or organizations for use in digital marketing materials, websites, or blog posts. However, there are a few sites that offer free stock photos. Free stock photos are extremely valuable to bloggers because they can save bloggers thousands of dollars in licensing and design fees, and hundreds of hours of time. This article will feature the best free stock photo sites for bloggers.
Best Free Stock Photo Sites for Bloggers
1. Unsplash
Unsplash offers a large collection of free high-resolution photos and has become one of the best sources for stock images. The Unsplash team combs through new submissions and features the very best photos on their homepage. All photos are released for free under the Unsplash license.
The Unsplash license is very permissive. It is like a Creative Commons Zero License (CC0). It allows users to use photos for commercial or non-commercial purposes without providing any attribution or obtaining permission.
This has allowed the service to become one of the largest photography suppliers on the web. Whether you are a blog writer looking for images to perfectly suit your content, or a company looking to visually tell a story about itself.
You can even search for collections of the best Unsplash image collections, organized by users for any topic!
2. Pexels
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through their discover pages.
3. StockSnap
StockSnap has a large selection of beautiful free stock photos and high resolution images. The site also has a very handy search feature making it easy to browse through the thousands of images available. In addition, the site tracks views and downloads so you can find the most popular photos available.
StockSnap adds hundreds of images on a daily basis and all photos are released under creative commons public domain – no attribution required.
4. Vecteezy
Vecteezy has over a million free stock photos and a curation team that manually reviews every image submitted to the site. Their search is powerful – you can filter the images results by color, orientation, style, number of people, age of people, and more.
Vecteezy requires attribution but includes signed model and property releases for every free photo. This protects you (and your projects) from legal risks.
5. picjumbo
PicJumbo offers a variety of free images for any kind of use—free of charge with no registration required. You can also get new free images by subscribing to their newsletter.
6. FOCA Stock
FOCA is a collection of high resolution photos provided by Jeffrey Betts. Jeffrey specializes in photos of workspaces and nature. All photos are released under Creative Commons CC0.
7. Picography
Gorgeous high-resolution free photos. The free stock photos from Picography can be used for any project. No attribution, all CC0 free images.
8. KaboomPics
Every single day new photos of the highest quality are added to KaboomPics. You can download and use them for your own purposes – grace your blog posts, create lovely graphics for your social media accounts, make your website more appealing – all for free, including the commercial use!
9. Skitterphoto
All photos on Skitterphoto are public domain. This means that all photos are free to use for any purpose. You may download and edit photos and even use them commercially. One nice feature is that users can browse their categories or search by keywords.
10. Gratisography
Gratisography is really pushing the whimsy here. Download any of their free high-resolution stock photos for whatever use you want, thanks to a “peace of mind” license. Lots of illustrations are available, too.
11. RawPixel
RawPixel has a decent collection of Public Domain images (either photos that have fallen out of copyright, or has been dedicated to the public domain). Collated and digitally enhanced from international museums and their own original collection of artworks. You do need to sign up with a free account to get it.
12. Reshot
Reshot is a massive library of handpicked free stock photos you won’t find elsewhere. Built for startups, freelancers & makers who are sick of tacky stock photos. Free to use commercially and editorially–no attribution required.
13. Life of Pix
Life of Pix is a resource created by the LEEROY creative agency offering free high-resolution photos with no copyright restrictions.
14. LibreShot
LibreShot offers unique stock photo site with free images for commercial use. CC0 license. Just search, download and use. No attribution required.
15. RGBStock
RGBStock has a huge number of high quality free stock photos and dazzling free graphics for illustrations, wallpapers and backgrounds. Need a free picture for your commercial website? Want an image for your blog? Looking for ideas? Check out the RGBStock galleries packed with high quality stock photos and find what you are searching for.
16. ISO Republic
ISO’s Republic’s mission is to “provide high-quality images to be used by designers, developers, bloggers, marketers, and social media teams.”
And all it takes is one quick scan of the website to know that it is succeeding in doing just that. (So much so that it’s hard to believe the images are free)
For those looking for access to more exclusive free photos, ISO Republic invites you to sign up for its email list and receive photos right to your inbox.
17. Startup Stock Photos
Startup Stock Photos are free startup, office, and tech stock pictures ready for your next project. Startup stock Photos boasts over a million users.
18. FoodiesFeed
Foodiesfeed is the perfect stock photo site for anyone with a food blog. The delicious images you’ll find here are so detailed, you might forget they aren’t real when you view them.
Choose from over 1,300 photos, filter according to food types and check out the popular tags too, such as top viewed, healthy, and vegan.
19. Freerange Stock
Freerange Stock offers legally sourced, high-resolution stock images, illustrations and textures for commercial use.
Not only is there a lot to choose from, but the photos are good quality, too. Images provided directly (in-house) by Freerange Stock originate one of two ways. They are either digitally photographed on Canon DSLR cameras or they are a high resolution (4000 dpi) Nikon scan of an original 35mm slide.
20. Styled Stock
StyleStock offers free feminine stock photography for every woman entrepreneur. The collection is totally free for your commercial & personal works.
21. FreeImages.com
Free Images provides over 300,000 free stock images under its own license. The license allows a very broad range of uses, though it does list several restricted use cases (which are quite common for most free images sites).
22. Nappy
Nappy is a free stock photo site on a mission: “To provide beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people to startups, brands, agencies, and everyone else.”
On their site, they talk about how many stock photo sites depict unrealistic representation, and if they don’t, there’s often a lack of diversity in the people being depicted. This presents a real problem for creators who are intentional about representation in articles, designs, and ads. nappy calls on their audience to “tackles diversity and representation one photo at a time.”
Best of all, their library is completely free
23. Freestocks.org
Freestocks.org is a stock photo site created by three photographer pals in their spare time. You’ll find a lot of documentary-style shots here, which can give a social feed a much-needed dose of authenticity.
24. New Old Stock
Few readers can resist a good black and white photo.
New Old Stock collection of vintage photos comes from the public archive via Flickr Commons. According to the website, the photos are free of any known copyright restrictions.
That said, while it’s likely that they are safe to use for things like blog posts and hero images, you’ll want to read up on the rights and usage below before you use them for any type of commercial project.
25. PicSpree
Picspree allows users to download free images, illustrations, vectors and icons. Easy and fast. No attribution or sign up required. Picspree is free for both personal and commercial use.
26. Negative Space
Negative Space offers up new free stock photos every week. All of its photos are shared without copyright restrictions, meaning you’re free to use them however you please.
From architecture to technology, Negative Space’s continuously growing collection of images is one you’ll find yourself tapping into again and again. The best part? It’s easy to filter through the gallery of photos, which are sortable by category, copy space position, and color.
27. DepositPhotos
DepositPhotos offers a sample of free images, vectors, editorial content, and video, which is updated every week. You can also sign up for an account to get the free stock files every week.
28. Realistic Shots
Realistic Shots contains free stock photos (high resolution) for personal and commercial use. 7 new photos are added every week, and all photos are approved for personal or commercial use.
29. Little Visuals
Little Visuals is a collection of the late photographer Nic Jackson’s work. It remains available to use any way you want — his family has ensured all of his images will stay accessible and open to the public.
30. MorgueFile
Morguefile is one of the oldest of the free stock photo sites. It was started back in 1996 as a free image exchange for creative professionals and teachers. It’s still alive and well, with images now available for anyone and everyone to use however they see fit. There’s a lot of amateur stuff here, but also lots of hidden gems.
31. Vice’s Gender Spectrum Collection
To help improve representation of gender in all its forms, Vice has compiled a collection of Creative-Commons-licensed photos of gender-diverse and non-binary models for anyone to use.
32. The Jopwell Collection
The Jopwell Collection contains several albums with hundreds of images featuring people in the Jopwell community. The images are free to be downloaded and used as long as you visibly attribute Jopwell.
33. CreateHER Stock
CreateHER Stock is a stock photography site that features authentic images of Black women created by founder Neosha Gardner. While the pricing at $10 per month, there is a collection of “freebies” that includes more than 185 images. Keep in mind that CreateHER Stock is not intended for commercial use without an extended license.
34. Death to Stock
Unlike most stock photo websites websites mentioned in this article, Death to Stock doesn’t have a gallery of images. It sends you 20 new photos every month when you sign up for its newsletter.
35. SplitShire
Whether you are looking for abstract images, or photographs of animals, vehicles, blur backgrounds, fashion, food, interiors, landscapes, nature, people or wedding related images, you can find some awesome photos on SplitShire. SplitShire offers free stock images & videos that are absolutely without any copyright restrictions (CC0) – free and legal – with no attribution needed.
Conclusion
I hope you found this article on the best free stock photo sites for bloggers, useful! Although I’ve used all these different stock photo sites when creating images for my blog banners (or other designs on my blog), my go to resource for free stock photos is definitely Unsplash. The images are always high quality, free, and there are always more images being added.
Still, if I am working on an especially important design, I will use some of the premium services for images such as Shutterstock or CanvaPro. Luckily, if you just need a few of these premium images, you can simply create a free account for either platform.
