While it can be a little annoying, once you scroll past the paid results, you’ll find thousands of free options. Pixabay boasts a large collection of not just stock videos and photos, but also music, sound free stock photos for designers effects, illustrations, and vectors. Assets are also organized into helpful collections, making it easier to browse by theme. The footer of the website includes links to trending photo topics as well.
Another popular site for creators looking for high-quality photos and stock videos is Pixabay. Pixabay has over 2.6 million high-quality images and videos free for personal and commercial purposes. The site is easy to use and has quality filters to help you find what you’re looking for. And there are options for all budgets — premium stock photos are more affordable than you might imagine. If you plan on creating your own image but want a head start, Vecteezy is a good resource. Head over to Startup Stock Photos — another niche stock site, where you’ll find thousands of high-quality images of office environments and startup boardrooms.
Rawpixel Public Domain
Unsplash boasts a huge inventory of high-resolution images and makes them easy to find with the search box, which leads to a host of relevant images. Created in 2013, Picjumbo has a vast collection of images submitted by photographers and travelers, and all are high resolution, great quality, and totally free. Hundreds of new options are uploaded daily, so there’s always fresh material. With more generous prices than the big competitors, Death to Stock Photo is a great paid alternative for those who need original, creative, high-resolution photos and videos. More than 6,500 new photos are added every month, all produced by talented artists funded by the platform’s membership plans.
All content is responsibly sourced from the most talented artists around the world. Categories like “Hijinks Hands” “Goofy Grownups,” and “Amusing Animals” deliver on that promise of quirkiness. If you’re looking for standard business stock photos, this site is not for you. Here, you’ll find photos and illustrations that are colorful, loud, and silly. It’s the perfect site for creatives who want stock photos that fit into their not-so-corporate or traditional branding. Like many other free stock photo sites, Pixabay includes “sponsored” options in search results that link out to assets for sale on iStock.
Exclusive, unique content.
While there are plenty of photos and videos to choose from, you’ll still see Shutterstock ads throughout the site, subtly marked by a gray background behind the assets. If you don’t want to pay for Shutterstock assets, be sure to stick to Iso Republic’s collections. If you’re looking for stock videos as well as photos, check out these stock photo websites that also include royalty-free video footage. Another great royalty-free image website you can use is picjumbo with galleries of fantastic free photos you can choose from.
- Whether you use a free stock site or pay for higher-quality photos, be sure to read any copyright restrictions carefully, so you understand what you can and can’t do with the media you choose.
- As the name suggests, Icons 8 offers a wide variety of stock icons, along with stock illustrations, photos, and music.
- Unsplash also provides a popular API that developers leverage to add quality photo searching to their apps and tools.
- The founders of Startup Stock created the site in 2014, starting with just a few photos of their friends and family.
- It also offers vector graphics in EPS format, so it’s worth a look for designers, too.
The Public Domain Review is also an online magazine, with essays and other collections. Highly regarded by specialized critics, the site attracts droves of researchers, writers, scholars, and art history lovers. Founded in 2011, the platform offers a wealth of media from public archives, some of it more than a century old. Vintage Stock Photos is a wonderful photo resource for creators with a soft spot for nostalgia. You can find thousands of photos, most of which are somewhere between 40 and 80 years old, in remastered JPEG format. Purchase a paid Site plan to publish, host, and unlock additional features.
Finding high-quality design resources
The downside is, they really are ALL over the web, including your competitor’s websites. Sign up today to gain unlimited access to thousands of exclusive images with our peace-of-mind licenses. In addition, your ongoing membership allows our team to continually support our global creative community and fund future projects. Discover 5 things you need to do when you’re building websites that let other people publish and share content. What stands out about New Old Stock is the uniqueness of their collection. StockSnap, a royalty-free, Creative Commons zero license image website, is another bookmark to add to your list of free photo collections.
If it seems too good to be true, you may end up paying a higher price later. The founders of Startup Stock created the site in 2014, starting with just a few photos of their friends and family. Today, the site attracts thousands of visitors, especially bloggers, freelancers, designers, and content marketers. Picography stands out for its advanced search filters, which help you find the perfect image you’ve been searching for.
Transforming the design process at
Another positive is that all photos are Creative Commons Zero licensed, which means they’re free for personal and commercial use with no attribution. The photos available on Picography are high quality, making them great for marketing and advertising professionals. It offers over a million professional photos, graphics, templates, mockups, and other design and illustration resources. There are also over 200,000 royalty-free illustrations for designers and illustrators to use freely, too. Most recently, Pixabay moved into the sound space and now offers hundreds of free sound effects and music. Unsplash also provides a popular API that developers leverage to add quality photo searching to their apps and tools.
Even if you have brilliant content, ample negative space, and great interactions, your web design will suffer if the images aren’t up to par. We all can’t be expert photographers and graphic designers, but free stock photography can help bridge the gap. Nappy’s creators wanted a collection of photos that helped businesses be intentional about cultural representation in their imagery. With an active community of photographers continually uploading new material, there’s no shortage of new images free to use for personal and commercial use. This collection of free stock photo websites makes finding those images easier.
One downside — though Unsplash has many high-quality photos, the site’s popularity can be a detriment with many of these images appearing in other blogs and websites over and over. The site also allows other photographers to share their images with users while adhering to the rules of the public domain. Any user photos are also evaluated before publishing and must meet quality standards. If you’re looking for stock photography sites that are out of the ordinary, check out Gratisography, certainly one of the most innovative stock photo sites on the web. For food bloggers and content creators in the restaurant space, Foodiesfeed is a must-have.
Vecteezy is one of the most popular platforms for designers, marketers, and freelancers, but even major brands are known to use it on occasion. With millions of hand-selected, high-quality photos, vectors, videos, and illustrations, it’s easy to understand why. As the name implies, the Natural Women Collection simply shows everyday women in their daily lives — working out, hanging with friends, and hugging their pets. And while it’s not a curated collection, it’s worth mentioning that the search results for “nonbinary” in Canva’s stock photo library produces nearly 1,000 free photos to choose from as well. It can be hard to find stock photos that look good and fit right with your designs. And searching for the best free stock images when you’re in the middle of creating a design can be frustrating.
In addition to photographs, you can purchase vectors, editorial pieces, sound effects, music, 3D models, backgrounds, and other creative assets. The Shutterstock platform also has an API that companies can integrate with their tools and apps. Photos serve a variety of niches including marketing and social media, digital ads, broadcasting and streaming, editorial content, and so much more. In this competitive digital arena, content creators, brands, and marketers need great visuals if they want their projects to stand out. Fortunately, there are millions of high-quality stock photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and even stock video footage to help bring your most eccentric ideas to life.
