The Best Sites to Find Real High-Quality Free Stock Photos.
Stock photos play a very important part on our web designs. We believe that beautiful and great photos are a key part in creating beautiful websites. But sometimes searching for high-quality stock photos is a pain. Buying stock photos from a photographer or stock image sites are sometimes out of your budget for your current project and you can end up with low-resolution, amateur pictures if you decide to go for the free ones. But the good news for us is there are a growing number of websites appearing on the web that provides amazing free stock photos. You can use these awesome photos free of charge for your personal and commercial projects – no attribution to the photographer required.
It is always nice to double-check the license of the photos before you use them on your projects but as far as we know, at the time of writing, all the photos on the sites listed below fall under the “do whatever you want” license. So get your bookmarks ready! Here is the round-up of the best websites where you can find free genuinely high-quality stock photos!
1. Unsplash
Provides high-resolution photos under the “do whatever you want” license. The images are excellent and stunning. One of the best on the web. They add 10 new photos every 10 days so it’s worth it to check back on a regular basis. Link: https://unsplash.com/
2. Picjumbo
A project by Viktor Hanacek. Provides totally free stock photos for your personal and commercial projects. It has a test drive feature which is really nice. You can preview the selected image in different ways that you could use it. Link: https://picjumbo.com/
3. Gratisography
Created by Ryan McGuire. Has a great collection of free high-resolution pictures that you can use for your personal and commercial projects. New photos are added weekly. Link: http://gratisography.com/
4. Life of Pix
A collection of free high-resolution photos, no copyright restrictions. New photos added weekly. Link: http://www.lifeofpix.com/
5. Jay Mantri
A collection of free high-resolution pictures from Jay Mantri. 7 new photos released every Thursday. Photos are really nice. Make magic with them. Link: http://jaymantri.com/
6. Startup Stock Photos
As the name suggest, it’s stock photos for startups. They provide a collection of stock photos of modern startup work environments. Free to use for your personal and commercial projects. Link: http://startupstockphotos.com/
7. Picography
Picography has hundreds of free stock photos for personal and commercial use. Use their amazing photos however you like. Link: http://picography.co/
8. New Old Stock
For those who love old, vintage, retro photos; this is the perfect resource for you. New Old Stock offers a cool collection of vintage photos from the public archives free of known copyright restrictions. Link: http://nos.twnsnd.co/
9. Pexels
Pexels is definitely one of our favorite photo sites. They offer a huge collection of beautiful stock photos completely free licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. All Their photos are nicely tagged and searchable. The website is also very easy to navigate. Link: https://www.pexels.com/
10. Death to the Stock Photo
Created by photographers Allie and David. Simply sign up with your email and you will receive a pack of beautiful stock photos within a specific category every month in your inbox. The quality of photos is really nice. Link: http://deathtothestockphoto.com/
Unlike the other free photo sites we’ve mentioned, Death to stock photo uses their own license which says that you can use the photos wherever and however you please, just don’t redistribute them, claim they are yours, or use them in porn, hate, and other bad uses. Anyway, we know you won’t do that kind of stuff.
11. Visual Hunt
Visual Hunt has a huge collection of beautiful Creative Commons photos. Not all photos are released under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license but that won’t be a problem since visual hunt has a great search and filter feature. Simply use its filter feature to select all CC0 Photos and you’ll have access to more than 62,000 amazing photos totally free for commercial use. Other features we love about Visual Hunt are the ability to filter photos by colors and the feature to save your favorite photos and make them available for bulk download. Link: https://visualhunt.com/
Wrapping It Up
There are still a lot of great photo sites out there. The websites that we mentioned are just some of our favorites. We regularly use them as a resource for the stock photos we use in our web designs. For additional stock photo sites, you may also want to check out the list below:
- Superfamous
- Public Domain Archive
- Splitshire
- Little Visuals
- FoodiesFeed
- Minimography
- Stock photo startup collection from ThemesKingdom
- Free stock photos from Oliur Rahman
- RawPixel
- Kaboompics
Have you used any of these resources in your projects? Any additional great photo resource you know? Let us know in the comments section below.
