We human beings are visual by nature, so our brains would very much prefer visual data to text. In fact the humain brains processes images 60,000 times faster than text, which is a remarkable difference.
Good and relevant photos play an essential part in attracting visitors’ attention and converting potential customers and thus generating sales.
It is important that you leverage visual materials to get your message across faster. But what if you don’t have enough visuals for your websites and projects?
Below we present you top 10 best free stock photo websites where you can find millions of stock images and most of them are free for commercial use.
Free Stock Photos
Stock photos are the supply of photographs that are taken by photographers and they are often licensed for specific uses. Stock photos are used in various cases including but not limited to websites, news, backgrounds, presentations, slides, blog posts, ads, etc.
When searching for stock photos, you will surely come across paid stock photo websites like iStock by Getty Images, ShutterStock and Adobe Stock . These sites are certainly great, you can find virtually any type of stock photos you want from these stock sites, but at a steep price. Expensive as they are, they offer benefits and protection you may not find on other free stock photo sites, the most obvious benefit is you get explicit license from the photo owners and you won’t get into legal troubles.
Fortunately, there are many free alternatives.
1. Pexels
Pexels is a notably popular stock photo site that we can’t ignore. I myself frequently visit and download images from pexels. Its powerful image search engine grants you full access to their huge collections of free stock photos. It provides real-time dropdown options of related keywords from what you type. Pexels allows you to filter stock images by orientations, sizes and colors (custom hex code supported). What’s more attracting is they offer original image size download.
2. Pixabay
Pixabay is another go-to place for free stock photos. It has an extensive library of more than 2.7 million royalty free stock photographs. What sets Pixabay apart is it offers more than just free stock images, free illustrations , video clips, music and sound effects are also big advantages. Pixabay’s robust search system allows you to filter your search results by asset types, orientation, size, color, published date and sort by relevance, editor’s choice, latest, trending, which fine-tunes your search experience to find the exactly free stock photos you are looking for.
3. Unsplash
Yet another great site for beautiful free stock images and pictures. Unsplash is a visuals community powered by creators around the world. It is somewhat business oriented as you can find a huge collection of backgrounds, textures, patterns as well as wallpapers. Just like Pexels, the free stock photos can be downloaded in its original sizes without an account. It also offers filters like orientation, color and you can sort your search results by relevance and date.
One exclusive feature that makes Unsplash stand out against the others is its advanced Visual Search functionality. Simply grab your image and drop it into the Visual Search dropzone, and its powerful algorithm system will search for and list all photos/images that are similar to your image. What’s even more compelling is you can refine your results by entering a keyword just like Google Image.
4. Vecteezy
Vecteezy is an actively updated repository of stock images. It has the most powerful filtering system when compared with the rest of free stock photo sites, you can filter your results by color, orientation, style, number of people, age of people, and people composition. By selecting Free License, you get a list of all free stock photos. Images on Vecteezy are high quality because all images are manually review by Vecteezy staff to ensure users get the best possible resources. In addition, Vecteezy is most known for its Vector arts, and it also offers free video downloads.
With all these advantages, there is indeed one thing you need to know and you should, the stock photos marked free can be used for free, but attribution is needed. You’ll need to upgrad to Pro plan to get unlimited downloads and use its resources without attribution.
Attribution: required for free stock photos
5. MorgueFile
MorgueFile offers more than 40,000 free stock images and they are all free for commercial use. The photos on MorgueFile is somewhat quite un-organized, it only provides you with a few hashtags. The images are not that high-quality, some even out of focus. If you are looking for high quality banner images, MorgueFile might not be the best place. Another downside is you have to register to download. You can sort search results by date, popularity, downloads, views, likes. But anyways, it is free, demand nothing when it is free.
Note: the vectors, videos, templates are sponsored results pulled from ShutterStock.
6. RawPixel
RawPixel may seem different in its way of offering free stock photos as it mixes photos, illustrations, PNG elements, backgrounds and mockups in its search results. But when you get a hang of it, it’s a treasure. Its robust search engine automatically retrieves the best matching results for you. You can further refine the results by topics, file types, editorial or non-editorial usage, styles, or specific size ratio. RawPixel claims it adopts a different approach of providing free stock images, instead of competing with other free stock photo sites, it gathers amazing photographers, artists and graphic designers to create the best design resources in the industry.
By creating a free account, you are granted with 5 downloads per day and becoming a premium member means unlimited premium resources downloads for commercial use.
7. Burst by Shopify
Burst is an online free stock photos platform that is powered by Shopify, world’s leading e-commerce SAAS provider.
The stock photos on Burst are without a doubt business oriented, and they are curated and absolutely free to use for commercial purposes without attribution, you can use them on your websites, blog, online store, school projects, instagram ads, facebook posts, desktop backgrounds, client work and even more.
8. Freepik
Freepik is a curated library of millions of quality free stock photos. The powerful search system helps you query whatever is in your mind. You can filter out the photo search results by people, color, orientation, publish date. In addition to photos, Freepik also offers free vector illustrations , PSD design files, icons and fonts and the recently added 3D models. Digital resources downloaded from Freepik are compatible with popular design programs.
9. NegativeSpace
NegativeSpace is a relatively smaller size stock images site when compared with other sites of the list. The photos on Negative Space are quite nice and covers a wide range of topics, but some photos intersect with other sites. The search function is rather straightforward but without filters, the only available features are its tags and collections differentiated by colors. The free stock photos on NegativeSpace are licensed under CCO, which means you can use them wherever you want and for whatever purposes for free.
10. PicJumbo
PicJumbo has been around in the stock photos industry for about ten years. It is a free stock photos site create by designer & photographer Viktor Hanacek. The reason why he crafted this stock image site is quite interesting, his photographs were rejected by major stock photo sites due to its “lack of quality”. Now picjumbo is burgeoning site that provides free stock photos, free backgrounds and free high quality images for both personal and commercial use. Though the number of resources are not very big as of now, the stock photos from picjumbo are sharp, well framed and extremely high in quality. If you are looking for high quality stock photos, picjumbo is really a nice place to go.
P.S.
Though most of these sites claim their stock photos are FREE to use, but as we all know, free means you have the freedom to use them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are free to use them wherever you want, or for whatever purpose. Please read their general licenses and photo-specific license carefully to not incur any future legal issues.