There’s always a great need for great photo’s, specially in the social media and visual economy era. The picture you use along side your link when sharing on social media or the image used in an ad can make all the difference to its success. But often buying stock photo’s can work out to be expensive, especially for small business and start ups.
Recently there has been an increase in people sharing free photo’s, these can be used however you want for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. These photo’s are released under the CC0 licence. This means you can “You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission”. Take the one you see in this post for example, it is from one of these websites.
Below are 10 awesome websites where you can find free stock photo’s.
1. Unsplash
Unsplash has a ton of free stock photo’s one of my favourites. Best for landscape and scenery images. Up and till now you have’t been able to search for a photo but it seems they are now working towards that by tagging photos, which will be really useful. They add 10 new photos every 10 days so be sure to check frequently.
2. Picjumbo
Picjumbo is another one of my favourites. They have a large number of images and they are searchable by category.
3. StockSnap.io
Again another one of my favourites. Really high quality images, with new images being added on a weekly basis. What I like about StockSnap is the photo’s follow trends, the current recentl photo’s added are all related Christmas, which is what most designers will be looking for at the moment. They also have a really great search feature.
Gratisography has some really cool and somewhat unusual photo’s. If you’re looking for something different you will definitely find it here. They do have a search function available.
5. Pixabay
Pixabay claim to have over 530,000 photo’s so you will be sure to find something here. Pixabay also include vectors and videos. Pixabay have a whole variety of images all with a really simple searchable tool.
If you are looking for something antique or historic pictures this one is for you. They have curated old photo’s from the public archives that are free of any copyright. They are really interesting. Unfortunately, not searchable.
7. Getrefe
Getrefe has a wide range of stock photo’s. However you may frequently find yourself coming across photo’s you have already seen on other websites. Images are not searchable.
8. The Pic Pac
This one is interesting, they have images of planes! They also have pictures from specific US cities. If you are looking for photo’s of San Francisco, this is the stock photo website for you. New photos are added weekly. Images are not yet searchable, but given the limited number of images at the moment, it is not required, they are broken down by theme.
9. Splitshire
Splitshire has a wide range of photo’s. You cannot search but the images are tagged.
10. Life of Pix
Life of Pix is a website by an advertising agency in Montreal. They have some really cool original photos. They are all searchable and new photo’s are added weekly.
Note: we have not checked every single photo on these websites, so please make sure they are under the CC0 licence before using.
If you come across any other websites please let us know in the comments and we will try to add them here and keep an up to date list.
