Top 20+ sites for free stock photos that help boost your brand
As I wrote in my Top 5 Online Design Tools to Create Stunning Images For Your Social Media, content marketing is becoming more and more visual. As bloggers, entrepreneurs, marketers and business owners, we need stunning photos more than ever. We use them for conveying the right message to our audience, to spice up our blogs and articles, draw traffic to our website, engage our readers and for having shareable social media posts.
Visuals are not just pretty. Our readers expect to see them. The experts also expect to see them.
Sure, using the brand custom photos is the ideal option. But not everyone affords this. And if you want to keep readers engaged with your written content, you need visuals.
So, what option do you have? If you want images that really stand out, the best solution is to use stock photos. But finding the right images that fit exactly with your needs can be a daunting task if you don’t know exactly where to look for.
Where do you find those amazing pictures that match with your style and color scheme and represent perfectly your brand, elevate your online content to the next level and make it look really professional?
Well, the good news is that you can find both free and royalty-free stock photos websites that can be a great resource for the images you need.
In this post, I’ll focus on the first category. I’ve put together a list of my favorite 20 sites that offer hi-res, amazing images that will help boost your brand.
Unsplash
Unsplash is one of my top three favorite places where I look for free photos. It has over 550.000 high-quality images, offered by the communities of photographers. You may find here a lot of pictures that you can use for personal or commercial projects totally for free. The best part? They upload ten new photos every day, that you can have into your email inbox if you subscribe.
Picjumbo
I just love Picjumbo for the large collection of free photos they provide for either personal and commercial use! Also, they have a premium membership for which you’ll get more advantages. You’ll get 30+ extra premium images every month directly to your inbox where you can download the full collection with one click.
Gratisography
The site features styled, high-resolution photos that you can use both for your personal and commercial projects for free. The whimsical section is absolutely awesome! All the pictures have some Photoshop-style manipulations that matter a lot when you are not a designer!
Pixabay
Pixabay is my second favorite resource, where I can find stunning quality stock photos free for personal and commercial use! It’s also probably the easiest-to-use stock photo website. You can search photos by applying different filters such as category, type, orientation, and colors! The best part? On Pixabay you may find not just photos, but also illustrations, vector graphics, and videos!
Pexels
Burst provides stunning images for many categories such as people, flowers, beauty, business, coffee, nature & many more! All the photos on this website are high-resolution and completely free to use for both personal and commercial projects.
Splitshire
Having as mission helping “to be awesome out there with great content”, Splitshire contains a large collection of high-quality photos free for personal and commercial projects. The images are easy to search, categorized and easy to download!
Pikwizard
Pikwizard is the newest addition to the stock photography family. There are over 100,000 high-quality images on the site, with 20,000 that are completely exclusive to Pikwizard. Perhaps the standout feature of this site is its images of people, which are few and far between on the best stock photography sites. There is no attribution required
Stokpic
This website includes a collection of free beautiful photos under Creative Commons Zero License. This means you can use them free of charge for personal and commercial projects, as long as you use them legally. All the pictures are categorized and downloadable from the homepage.
ISO Republic
The website includes thousands of high-resolution CC0 licensed images for your creative project. This means they are free for both personal and commercial projects, as long as you use them legally. The photos are categorized for an easier search and download. If you subscribe to their newsletter, you get the latest free stock photos straight into your inbox.
Foodiesfeed
This website is dedicated to the food lovers. If you are a food blogger, then this resource might be exactly what you need for your written projects. All photos published here are licensed under Creative Commons Zero License, which means you can use, copy, modify and distribute them for free, both for personal and commercial projects.
StockSnap
Similar to Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay, this website includes a large category of beautiful and high-quality stock photos both for personal and commercial projects – for free. The search is very easy, StockSnap using a tag-based category system to help you browse and find the images that fit you best.
Kaboompics
This website is one of the most popular sources of free images for specialized bloggers, lifestyle and interior design. The pictures are very well tagged, so the finding and downloading of what you need is very easy.
LibreShot
Created by Martin Vorel, LibreShot is a project that contains free stock photos for private and commercial use. This website stands out especially with the gorgeous photos with muted tones. If this is your style, then LibreShot might be your next favorite source of pictures.
Life of Pix
This website includes a collection of gorgeous high-resolution pictures, free for use for personal and commercial projects. It uses a strong search function that makes easy to find and download the images you are looking for.
Fancycrave
All the images are released under the Creative Commons Zero License, so you can use them without any legal complication. Both for personal and commercial projects. This website is a great source of free stock photos for creatives of all kinds.
GoodFreePhotos
This website is useful especially for travel content projects. The pictures are categorized by location.
PlixS
This website includes a very large collection of beautiful and high-quality photos. The pictures are organized by categories, which makes finding and downloading the right image very easy.
Picography
This website features clear, beautiful pictures released under Creative Commons Zero License, so you can use any of them for free however and whenever you like. Although, because they are uncategorized, the search of the perfect photo for you might be a bit cumbersome.
Free Images
This website includes a very large collection of beautiful, high-quality photos, both free and paid. They are organized by categories, so the pictures are easy to find and download. Just be sure to check the license for every image.
Skitterphoto
This website features a large collection of gorgeous photos, all of them being released under Creative Commons Zero License. This means you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
Bottom line
I know there are a lot of other websites out there that offer large collections of high-quality, beautiful photos. Both with free and paid pictures. But I focused here on those resources that provide free photos and I find them helpful. I hope you too. You may use any stock photo from any website, as long as they are legally used and they help you to boost your brand.
