One of the most frequently asked questions I get is: “Where can I find free stock photos for my blog or niche site?”
There are hundreds of stock photo websites around the web, and just as many “lists” compiling all of them in one place.
But there’s one problem: They’re usually a list of any and EVERY stock photo site on the web.
But most of the sites that offer free images are:
1. Full of low quality photos.
2. Mixed in with paid options with confusing licensing options, leaving you unsure about which ones you can actually take risk-free.
As a result, this list is going to be different.
Instead of making this the biggest list of resources, I’m filtering out everything to only provide you with the best and most reliable resources… the ones where you can actually use the photos for free (without confusion).
Photo usage on the internet
I’m sure everyone knows by now that you can’t just take an image off of any website and use it on your own site. Usually, you probably won’t be caught. But it does put you at risk to receiving a cease and desist/bill/DMCA or in the worst case… being sued.
I won’t get into the nitty gritty about the legal issues of using copyrighted photos here because that’s a topic that’s been covered heavily already by more authoritative sources.
So without further ado, here’s a list of the best possible FREE resources you can start using + some guidance on how to use them.
1. Google Advanced Image Search
Google Advanced Image Search will be your best bet for finding images of any kind for most niches.
This should be common sense knowledge, but I’ll just say it for reminder: You can’t just do a Google image search and take any ol’ image and slap it on your site. It’s like playing slots. Pick one that’s being monitored for unauthorized usage, and pay the price.
However, Google’s image search has gotten a lot more sophisticated over the years.
You can search solely for images that are free to use.
Just enter your keyword.
And remember to filter it by the proper usage right.
2. Stock.xchng
This company was bought by Getty Images, so will re-direct to a new URL (freeimages.com). However, everything still remains the same.
You might have heard of this website before. Every photo is free. Unlike other stock photo sites that make it confusing whether you need to buy a license or can simply use it, with Stock.xchang, everything is free to use.
There isn’t a huge selection of free photos depending on the keyword you search for, but they’re all free (and pretty high quality) so who can argue with that?
Just check out this free photo I’ve found searching for photography:
Credit: FreeImages.com/Tori Campbell
Not bad!
Attribution: Use of photos from this site requires you to give proper attribution in the format I’ve used above.
You can learn more about their attribution policies under each photo on their website.
To use the photo… You can right click and save as, but it’s better to just create a free account. That will give you options of different sizes by clicking on the download button.
3. Flickr
It’s impossible to leave out Flickr in a list of resources for free photos. It’s got a giant selection of some of the highest quality photos you can find. Not all of them are free to use, but they make it easy to filter them.
You’ll need to create a free Yahoo account before you can start downloading any photos, so do that first.
Once you do, do a search by entering in a few keywords in their search bar.
Next, filter out the list by license type.
You can go straight to the “No Known Copyright Restrictions” option to filter ones that don’t require any type of attribution. However, the list will be a lot smaller.
If you’re fine with giving credit on your page to the photographer, then choose “All Creative Commons”.
That will show you only a list of images that are free to use, but some will have more restrictions and usage requirements than others.
To find the licensing information of your preferred image, just look here:
In this case, it states that I’m allowed to use the image however I like, may modify it, and may even use it commercially. BUT… I have to give attribution.
So, this is what it would look like:
It’s a great photo, and merely having to place a credit link is more than worth being able to use the photo for free.
4. Pexels
Think the top 3 is more than plenty? Think again.
Pexels is one of the newer sites to hit the web and they make things SUPER easy for you. They, too, realized the complications of different copyright licenses.
That’s why… all the photos on their sites are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the photos.
The pictures are free for personal and even for commercial use. All without asking for permission or setting a link to the source. So that attribution is not required.
Pretty awesome, huh?
It gets better.
The site is full of very professional looking photos.
Just look at what I was able to find from looking for football photos:
It’s so great to be able to just sift through and download any of the photos on the site knowing that there are no usage documents to read through.
And here’s one from doing a search for sunsets:
Compare that to the Flickr one I had above.
This site is just so great, and I’m so glad I found it. They even offer free stock videos too!
5. Gratisography
This site doesn’t have a giant database of photos like the other sites that were mentioned so far. However, it’s super easy to use the photos.
It’s just a giant scrolling list of photos. They don’t require any attribution. To download and use a photo, just click on one and it will download immediately.
6. Burst
Burst is new to the scene, created by the team at Shopify.
With over 1000 high-quality images, they’re all available under the Creative Commons Zero license so you’re free to use and edit them as you see fit.
All of their images are very professional, like this one:
In addition to all of the fun lifestyle pictures on the site, they have a collection of product photography that follows trending business niches to help entrepreneurs make better products, websites, and marketing campaigns.
They also have a few in-depth case studies around business ideas which come with a set of photos and all the inspiration you need to get started, and more are on the way!
7. Unsplash
Saving my favorite for last Unsplash.
Another newer site that makes life super easy. They, too have filtered everything out so that EVERY photo on their site is absolutely free.
They’ve got a larger selection of photos on their site so doing a search will be required to find what you’re looking for.
Again, I did a search for sunset and this is what I found:
Seriously? Completely free, no attribution? This looks like the kind of photo you would see on an advertisement for Gap or something.
And here’s another one:
A lot of stock photo sites would sell photos like these for a couple of hundred dollars.
At Unsplash… it’s free.
8. FoodiesFeed
If you run a food blog or a site that has anything to do with food, you’ll fall in love with FoodiesFeed.
Their database isn’t huge right now (although its growing fast) but the quality of the pictures is awesome. Plus the variety is quite impressive for a small picture database as it covers almost all the popular cuisines and food categories.
You can explore pictures through the different food categories or by viewing trending pictures. You don’t need to sign up to download the pictures in full resolution but there is a 10 second waiting time. However, if you do sign up, your downloads will start immediately
9. Pixabay
Pixabay is one of the world’s top websites for royalty-free images and videos. It hosts more than 1.8 million high-resolution images that you can download for free without even registering with the site.
It’s giant multimedia database ha images and videos for you no matter what niche you’re in. However, becuase of the size of the site, finding the right images can be a bit of a struggle sometimes.
10. Reshot
Reshot is very different from usual stock photo sites in the sense that its images are captured by normal people and don’t have that “stocky” feeling to them.
It’s a particularly useful site if you’re looking for images to use on Instagram or Pinterest since it features a lot of images of people and different travel destinations.
11. StockSnap.io
StockSnap has thousands of high-quality royalty-free images and videos that are ideal for social networks and blogs.
It’s run by the team behind Snappa, a graphic design tool.
Most of the images on the site are crowdsourced but pretty high-quality. Like most other sites on this list, you can download the images from StockSnap for free but you need to link to the original source.
12. RawPixel
RawPixel is another great site to find stock free images and videos in all the popular online niches. It has both free and premium plans in which you can find thousands of images, videos, PSDs, vectors, icons, and illustrations.
You can explore images by directly searching for them or by exploring the different image boards that are managed by RawPixel users. Every board has images relate to a separate category which makes it easy to find relevant images.
13. ISO Republic
ISO Republic is run by a small team of photographers but their collection is pretty impressive. The site serves thousands of high-resolution royalty-free images that are perfect to use in blog content and on social media.
“Nature” appears to be their strongest category with some pretty awesome images that you can download and use directly on your site or by adding text with a tool like Canva or Visme.
14. PicJumbo
With just over 3000 images, PicJumbo isn’t the biggest site on this list but their image quality and variety are awesome.
You won’t find any low-quality images on PicJumbo in any category. You can explore images using the search option by clicking on image tags, or by clicking on the “more images like this” option with selected images.
They also give you the option to download all of their 3000+ images and PSD files as a single ZIP file by paying any price above $15.
Pretty good offer to be honest.
15. SplitShire
SplitShire is another site with a pretty modest library size but very impressive image quality standards. It is run by a professional photographer and almost al the pictures on the site belong to him.
You can use the images for free on your blog, social media profiles, or advertising content as long as you link back to the original resource.
One thing that you clearly notice on SplitShire is that the images are pretty trendy and almost always in line with the latest events and happenings around the world.
16. PikWizard
PikWizard is among the most impressive sites on this list. Its images have supreme quality and they’re all free to download.
The content on the site is crowdsourced and there’s a small limitation that you can’t use the images in product sales.
Other than that, you can freely use them on your blog or social media.
17. KaboomPics
KaboomPics is the final site I’m sharing but it’s easily among the top 5 sites on this list.
It hosts a library of more than 10,000 high-resolution images that are ideal for Instagram, Pinterest, and other visual platforms.
The images are free to use but you can’t resell them in their original form. To resell, you need to add some text or modify the appearance of the image in some way.
Thought I would end it off with a resource for icons.
For icons, there’s no better place than The Noun Project. You’ll find just about any icon you need from this website.
They’ve got a huge selection of icons for just about every keyword you search for, and they’re VERY professionally designed.
Here are a few I got back from searching for “web design”
And there are dozens more in the list!
The best part? They’re all free BUT will require attribution. If you don’t want to credit the author, then you can just buy it for $1.99, which is so worth it.
Conclusion
There are a countless number of stock photo sites on the web, but not many that actually offer high-quality photos for free.
The 7 resources listed above are more than enough to find all the images you will ever need for your niche sites and blogs.
I personally go straight to Pexels and Unsplash first since they usually have the highest quality images.
They’re free, high quality, and best of all… simple to use.
I was doing a Flickr search under Creative Commons once and ran across one with full copyright protection which caught me unawares. Rights usage on all the photos can change so to protect myself, here is what i do.
When I find a picture i am doing to download,
1)I create a desktop folder and download the picture to it. The download date shows when it was downloaded. I also take a screenshot of the rights being granted (creative commons attribution, non-deriv, etc) and put that in the same folder. 3) the name of the person to give attribution to goes in the same folder. The folder goes in the notes for the blog post or whatever I am using the image for.
2) As a result, I can prove that the image had the rights on the date I downloaded and that I gave attribution to the right person.
I have heard too many stories about the Getty Images letters. And if someone changed their rights after I downloaded to make them more restrictive and I had no proof as to what they were when I downloaded, I’m the one who is hung out.
I got your report after hearing about it from Jon from BC. good work.
Great extra tip, Jim. That’s going one extra step further to protect yourself. I’ve heard of the Getty Image horror stories, and even read of claims that that’s where they make a lot of their money from… which is just awful.
Flickr creative commons is a great place for free pics, i never knew that the rights can be changed, that’s surely a bit unfair if you download when its CC marked.
In all honesty though most people will never know that an image has been used. There isn’t much in terms of detection and most people uploading stuff to flickr etc are amateur and haven’t got the time to be searching to see whos using their images.
I believe if you downloaded it when it was cc and they change it, they’re not allowed to do anything about it. It’s just proving it that’s the difficult part if it ever comes to that. Should really never come to that, though.
Hi Chris,
happened to me… didn’t print the screenshot then, now when rechecking all the images I checked were copyrighted… would have been hard for me to prove
Dan
Yeah, definitely. If you use the sources above, you won’t have to worry about things like that 🙂
Awesome post, Chris. Loving your blog.
Can I ask you two tedious questions re: your main niche site?
Hosting- when you have a site getting close to 1m PV per month, what kind of hosting do you require? Are you still using like Bluehost shared hosting, or do you have a dedicated hosting plan?
AdSense- you’ve mentioned you have several niche sites. Do you just manage them all under the same AdSense account, or do you have multiple accounts? I thought I read somewhere that Google only allows one account per person.
Thanks!
Hey Jonathan, at that point you should go with dedicated, and it’s worth the money at that point.
Google does only allow one account per person, but you can always use separate accounts other ways like using family member accounts.
Good list with a few new ones to me.
I love Flickr, but I find that alot of hard to find images, like for a list post, that have a “NonCommercial” license, which is vague to the point of uselessness. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation
What’s your take on an AdSense site being “Commercial” or “NonCommercial” use?
Yeah I know what you mean, I hate all those different license types and the possibility of putting yourself at risk from misinterpreting them.
I don’t know the legal answer to that question, but I would assume it’s non-commercial as we’re not using their images as part of a paid product.
on flickr. would not be safe just to choose commercial use and allow mods? That’s what I do,
great post!
Good tip. Thanks, Omar.
Another question, sites like Flickr and Wikimedia Commons usually promote using their linking tools for photos, do you ever hotlink the images on your sites, or always self host them?
I usually just host them on my own site.
Awesome post! It’s hard to find great quality pictures, I am currently working on a website so I’m going to look on these site’s.
Chris, which free wordpress theme do you recommend for a informative website? I am thinking to use optimiser.
Thanks Ouail. Not sure about free wp themes. Any clean and simple theme is good. I usually prefer 2-column themes over 1-column themes, though.
Free is good… to get you going. Great list of sites to find images Chris. Do you also recommend using paid images once you start getting a decent amount of money from your site? I’d imagine when first starting out you have more time than money but then later on as your time becomes more valuable it would be worth it from a time perspective to use a stock site that has greater variety of photos/images, what do you think?
That’s entirely up to you. These free sites have more than enough options. But if you need a certain type of image that they don’t have then you can go paid.
Great list Chris!
The website for quality free / royalty free stock photos I use is Pixabay.com.
Regards,
Mickel
Nice! Thanks for sharing.
I 2nd Pixabay. I enjoy using them and contributing to them as well (they ask you submit too if you have good photos).
I always use pexels.com for high quality to design my wordpress theme.
Thank Chris that share this post
Cool, thanks for reading Sophy.
Chris, thanks for the suggestions.
TheStocks is one that I use, it includes Pexels, Gratisography, Pixabay and more similar sites,
You might find it a useful addition to the list.
http://thestocks.im/
Wow, looks good. Thanks for the share, Paul!
Nice list. I download all photos from Google Images just without watermark.
I never had any problem.
Nice!
😀
Thank you, very useful. Pixabay.com also good.
Cool, thanks for the suggestion.
A very nice collection of resources you’ve got here Chris,
Using good images on your posts is very very advisable and I’m surprise why some people still finds it hard to understand this.
An image they say speaks a thousand if not a million words and when you use good and eye catchy ones, it will not only beautify your post but will also boost its social sharing.
I’ve come to discover that articles with relevant images tends to perform much more than the ones without images and this is one of the main reason why everyone should start using it.
I first heard of Gratisography from Quick Sprout and i like it because it doesn’t require you to give credit which can really be a time saver.
Will take time to check out the rest.
Thanks for sharing
Great points, Theodore! If you liked Gratisography, you’ll love Pexels and Unsplash 🙂
All very useful! Here are a few more free good-quality photo sites: kaboompics.com, uhdwallpapers.org, skitterphoto.com and cupcake.nilssonlee.se
Awesome! Thanks for sharing, Richard.
Nice. Let me add openfotos.com as another option.
Nice add! Thanks, John.
Hi,
Great article as info. Please also check out http://www.goodfreephotos.com for thousands of unique public domain photos, especially travel photos. Appreciate it if you could add it to your list of sites. Thanks.
Nice. Thanks for sharing, Bob.
great list…
but you miss a website that always use to find a great photo.
Check pixabay.com.
The amazing of this site, all images have free attribution license.
Nice share. Thanks, Michael.
Hello Chris, an other great post, I just become a fan of your blog.
2 question here:
a) Have you any certainty that using images in an Adsense blog improve the CTR?
a) In your Adsense blog do you use images like the one in this post I mean, same size and position?
Thanks in advance for your replay 🙂
Hey, not always. Images make your content more engaging and improves readability.
Yeah, I do use images similar to this. Some sites have a large feature image at the top rather than floated to the right.
You can also check our site http://imagefinder.co to find tons of free stock photos from various sources.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Chris,
Thank you for the site list of free stock photos.
I’m wondering if I like an image from shutterstock and it’s not free, and I can find that image elsewhere for free from torrent, or other websites. My question is can I use it on my website?
How does shutterstock knows who their buyers websites? I mean even it’s not legal but they are not gonna find out right?
Thanks
There are a few different ways, such as reverse image searching, water marking, and even image search engines built specifically to find unauthorized use. I’m sure there are others I’m not aware of.
A lot of the time, you probably won’t get caught. But if you do, it can cost 4-figures in legal fees as well as 4-figures to pay them off for the usage. That’s if they let it go lightly.
I have heard some folks are capturing any image they want off anyone’s webpage by just using an image capturing feature like PrtSc on your computer. Open the whole image and crop what you want. This way there is no detection (unless you name the photo the exact same thing or keep the logo on the pic). Is this true? What are your thoughts!
Not exactly sure what technology their using to find it, but I had a friend who had cropped a tiny bit of background out of a getty stock photo and got caught.
There are also:
http://www.thelightpaintersloft.com
http://www.barnimages.com
Awesome! Thanks for sharing Primera.
Here is a compiled list of the free image sites above:
thelightpaintersloft.com
barnimages.com
imagefinder.co
pixabay.com
goodfreephotos.com
kaboompics.com
uhdwallpapers.org
skitterphoto.com
cupcake.nilssonlee.se
thestocks.im
unsplash.com
gratisography.com
pexels.com
videos.pexels.com
flickr.com
freeimages.com
google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en
Thanks to all.
Hi Chris
Wow! Seems great helpful list of a free stock photo source. From the list, I like pixels and would like to add Pixabay as another great option.
As always, a fantastic post.
Imer
Nice, thanks again Imer 🙂
As a blogger i know it is necessary to insert qulaity images in articles aprt from flickr all are new to me. thanks for sharing
No problem 🙂
Royalty free images can have different licenses. Wikimedia Commons and Creative Commons can be good place to find images that you can use commercially.
Thanks for chipping in Sienna!
Thank you Lee, you are one of the most generous in the field…keep up the good work.
Much appreciated.
That means a lot to me. Thank you Kay 🙂
Thanks, I have been looking for a source of new stock images and the sample photos that you put up look beautiful. Thank you.
Nice!
Hi, you should also add Visual Hunt (visualhunt.com)
They have great photos, all for free. I have been using the site since 2 years. I love it. 🙂
Thanks for sharing Keta!
Chris,
Thanks for sharing these resources. I have used pexels many time.
One tip. I use Canva.com to enhance the pictures by adding text and more contrast.
I also always add a little text block with my website url at the bottom. In this way if someone shares my picture they can see where it was originally published.
Again, thanks for sharing
Eward
That’s an awesome tip Edward. I’ve used Canva many times. I prefer Stencil myself.