Do you struggle with taking good, quality images for your website or blog? The truth is many webmasters are not moonlighting as professional photographers, taking awesome pictures for their site. They instead rely on stock images that are available online. If you are wondering where you can find some of the best images for your website, you should look no further. Here are twenty of the best websites for free images and photographs:
Creative Commons– Creative Commons is a website that curates stock images from other well-known sites. You can sort the images based on use, such as commercial, adaptable, or can be built upon.
Picography- This site offers really high quality, hi-resolution images that can be used for your site with no copyright restrictions.
Photo Pin- Photo Pin offers users free images for bloggers and webmasters to use on their sites. While the images are often submitted by amateur photographers, you can find plenty of nice pictures to use.
Pixabay- PIxabay provides nice copyright-free images that can be modified and distributed without any attribution required.
Flickr- Flickr is one of the largest stock image sites on the internet. It provides millions of pictures that are free to use with proper attribution.
Compfight- This website is a basic image search engine that utilizes the Flickr application programming interface to generate results, but they are not directly affiliated with Flickr.
Unsplash- Unsplash provides free high quality images that you are allowed to use in any way you wish. Ten photos are added to the site every ten days.
FreeFoto- FreeFoto is an image search engine that is home to over 130,000 images in a variety of industries to use on your site with attribution.
DeviantArt- This site is an online community for artists to post their work for their peers. You may be able to use some of these images by linking back to the profile of the artist.
Wikimedia Commons- This image search website is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation and is home to millions of high quality images in a variety of subject matter.
Getty Images- Getty Images is another one of the most well known image banks that provides stock images for online services. Most images have to be paid for; however, they have recently made over 35 million images available for bloggers to use free of charge.
Stock.xchng- Stock.xchng is owned by Getty Images and provides users with hundreds of thousands of images for use on their site. Quality ranges from low to high quality.
ShutterStock- This site offers royalty-free images and vectors for use online. You will have to sign up for a free subscription that allows you to download a certain amount of images each day.
Foodies Feed- Foodies Feed offers amazingly beautiful and high quality images for your food blog or websites.
Morguefile- Morguefile is a stock image sharing site that has been around since 1996. It provides images used by just about any industry you could imagine, from technology to cooking.
PhotoRack- This website provides hundreds of thousands of free images as well as textures, wallpapers, and vectors to use for your web design.
IM FREE- IM FREE is a smaller site that provides a variety of images and icons in industries such as art, recreation, fashion, and technology.
Magdeleine- A high-resolution photograph image site, Magedeleine provides pictures submitted by photographers that represent a more vintage style.
Public Domain Archive- The owner of this site updates regularly with new public domain images free to use on your site. The images are very nice, high-quality images of landscapes, vintage photographs, interior design, and more.
The question remains; which image site is the best? This will largely depend on your niche, your site design, and the style and tone of your content. The decision also relies heavily on the type of image you need. Take some time and check out each site to see everything that is offered, and then make a decision. The great thing is you can use any or all of these stock image sites, so feel free to pick and choose amongst them.
