Bloggers and business houses are always searching for high-quality images to focus their work. You will get tons of images, just by googling the requirement. But the sad fact is that most of them can’t be used because of copyright issue. If you are ready to pay, naturally one headache will end. And you can go ahead with next level of search for suitable visuals.
Then, what about beginners and small companies? Really, they may unable to invest in images too.
Thanks to Creative Commons(CC) license. It allows anyone to use creative works that are shared through their networks by adding a short note of credit to the creator. It means you need not pay even a single penny for High Definition images. You can use it absolutely free according to the licensing terms.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization based in California, US. It has released several licenses to the public without any cost. CC is managed by a board of directors and an advisory board, both of them contains 15 members each. Currently, there are over 300 million works licensed under various CC terms and 100+ affiliates working in over 70 jurisdictions for CC activities around the world.
This list contains some of our top picks to get free images for blogging, business and designing purpose. Kindly read the licensing terms carefully, before downloading the images.
1 ) Visual Hunt – Free stock photos
2) Picjumbo – Free photos for personal and commercial use
3) Photo Pin – Image search engine
4) Bigstock Photo – Over 19 million photos, vectors available but mainly focusing on the premium users
5) Little Visuals – You will get 7 high-resolution images in inbox every 7 days
6) Free Foto – It has over 1,30,000 free images in 3640 categories.
7) Kavewall – Free stock photos and textures
8) Free digital photos – Huge gallery of photos and illustrations
9) Death to the Stock Photo – Get free stock photos by email
10) Morgue File – Free High-Resolution images for designers
11) Free range – Free Images for commercial and non-commercial use
12) Getty Images – Millions of free and premium photos
13) Free Images – Huge collection of 4,00,000 photographs
14) Open photo – Photo sharing platform offers thousands of images under CC license.
15) Stockvault– Nearly 50,000 images, 3D renders and texture
16) Pixel Perfect Digital – Free stock photos, textures, backgrounds for designers
17) Splitshire – Free stock photos
18) Flickr – No need to introduce
19) Unsplash – Good site for HD images
20) Photober – Free images for personal and commercial use
21) Photo Dropper – A WordPress plugin to find free images. You can choose from more than 240,900,000 free images.
22) PDPics – Free public domain photos
23) Dreamstime – Images with free and Paid Options
24) Free Photos Bank – Good collection of photographs. No registration required.
25) Image Free – Another popular site, Registration needed.
26) Stock photos for free – Over 1,00,000 free photos, backgrounds etc.
27) Veezzlee – Search engine for free images
28) Free Stock – Another free site for images
29) Cepolina – Free stock photos about nature
30) Turbo Photo – Free stock photos
31) Imonomy – Big collection of beautiful pictures
32) New Old Stock – Good images
33) Superfamous – It is Los Angels based studio of famous designer Folkert Gorter. You can download HD images under CC license.
34) Imagebase – Free photos
35) Free Stock Photos – Nearly 15,000 free images available with commercial and editorial licensing
36) Shutter Stock – Millions of royalty-free stock photos
37) Big Foto – Stock photos based on countries, major cities
38) Corbis Images – Nice collection
39) Unprofound– Mainly used for design purpose. No signup required.
40) Gratisography – High-resolution images without copyright restrictions
41) Pixabay – Great source for any image we want
42) Death to Stock Photos – Subscribers will get 10 new photos, every month, in their inbox
43) Life of Pix – Free stock photos
44) Freepik – Millions of free photos, designs, vectors, icons available
45) Good Free Photos – Thousands of free public domain photos
46) IM Free – Free resources for commercial use
47) Public Domain Pictures – Over 80,000 free images
48) Stock Free Images – More than 1 million free images
49) Canstockphoto – Premium site with professional quality images
50) Turbo Photo – 2000 free stock images
51) Deviant Art – Brilliant collection
52) Photo Rack – Over 25,000 free images
53) Photocase – Premium images
54) Wikimedia Commons – 100% free images for any purpose
55) Fotolia – More than 30 million royalty free images
56) Public Domain Archive – Good collection of HD images
57) Allegriphotos – Nice collection of images, wallpapers
58) Photl – Unique 5,00,000 free images
59) Lost and Taken – Collection of patterns, textures for designers.
60) Dollar Photo Club – Premium image site
61) Istock Photo – Free stock files every week and premium collection too
62) Stocksy – Great premium site
63) Image After – Collection of Photos, Textures, Paintings, Designs. Mainly using for 2D/3D modeling.
64) GetRefe – It’s a Tumblr blog, that provides hi-res mobile photos
65) Free Stock Photos – Free photos, vectors and illustrations
66) Public Domain Photography – Awesome collection of free stock photos
67) Pickup Image – Users can edit, distribute works without asking any permission.
68) Every Stock Photo – Popular search engine to find free images
69) Rgbstock – Free photos, backgrounds and wallpapers
70) Free Media Goo – Free Images, Textures and Backgrounds
71) Allfreeimages – Small collection
72) Compfight – Best way to search images
73) SkitterPhoto – A place to find, show and share public domain photos
74) Foter – Good image search
75) stockphotos.io – More than 25,000 free stock photos
76) Library of Congress – Free images with attribution links
77) Free large photos – Good collection
78) Snapwire Snaps – 7 free beautiful photos every 7 days
79) Photofolio – Amazing photographs
80) Inmagine – Paid source of images
81) Albumarium – Beautiful photography
82) Free Pixels – 5700 images in 40 categories
83) FreePhotosIndex – Just good
84) Hire Stock – Good site for designers
85) Imagesource – Premium contents
86) Rawpixel – Stock photos for designing works
87) Google Images – Google advanced image search
88) Photo Gen – Free photos and textures
89) USGS – Images from US Geological Survey Photographic Library
90) About Pixel – A German site for browsing images
91) Photovaco.com – Photos, Vectors and Brushes
92) Sunipix – Over 15000 images
93) Freepix – Free stock photos. No signup required.
94) CC Search – Search required images in several sites at a time
95) Stock Vault – Photos, Textures and Illustrations
96) NASA Image Galley – Links to several NASA image sources
97) Adigitaldreamer – 100% free, royalty free images
98) Creativity103 – Images, design packs and wallpapers
99) Crestock – Premium images starting from $1
100) Ancestry Images – Royalty free images for researchers, students
101) Image Finder – Image search engine
102) Stock Up – Another image search engine that will show photos from 31 websites
103) Kaboompics – New site with clarity images
104) Free Images. co.uk – 13,500 free stock photos in 85 categories
105) Historical Stock Photos – Wide range of photos from history
106) Photoxpress – Premium Collection
107) Free Images Collection – Huge collection of copyright free images
108) Totally Free Images – Good one
109) Ookaboo – Nice source for free images
110) Kozzi – More than 70,000 free stock photos
111) Pexels– New free image site with thousands of HD images
112) Arias & Thompson – Free as well as premium stock photos
113) Stokpic – 10 New Photos Sent Every 2 Weeks
114) Magdeleine – Handpicked free photos
115) Kaboompics – Another source for high-quality free images
Interested in image related contents? The following posts could be useful:
- 10 Best Free Image Gallery Plugins for WordPress
- 25 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Photographers to Display and Sell their Work
- How to Automatically Watermark Your Images in WordPress
About The Author
Manoj
Manoj is a writer, blogger from Kerala, India. He writes contents on current affairs, technology, cinema, health, social media, and WordPress. His posts and stories appeared across magazines and websites since 1998. Get in touch with him via Twitter and Facebook.
That’s an amazing list of free image sites. I’ve been struggling along with about three 🙂 So thanks for that.
I was also interested to read more about Creative Commons. I knew the term meant it was “safe to use” but hadn’t appreciated that it was an actual organisation. Many thanks to them!
Joy – Blogging After Dark
Hi Joy,
We all need free images for articles, designs and various other online tasks. Hope this list will be helpful for all of them. I appreciate tour feedback and thanks a lot for dropping your comment with us.
Keep in touch.
Hi Manoj!
Awesome post, really useful!
Have you heard about rawpixel? You’ve probably seen our images all over the place. We’re the leading stock photo contributor in the world. We’ve just launched our website http://www.rawpixel. com, where we give away the best free design resources out there. We’d be stoked if you could add us to this list.
Looking forward to you joining our community of creatives.
BE INSPIRED. BE RAW.
/Jen
Hi Jennifer,
Thanks a lot for dropping your comment with us. I added your website to the list.
Keep in touch,
Take care,
no doubt these are all valuable resources.
also, for anyone looking for quality and free illustrations, i would recommend to check out pastelpad..com
Offering hand-picked quality illustrations for download and use in any personal or commercial activity. Free!
This is the most comprehensive list that I have seen on stock images and I have saved it to my Pinterest board so I can check out the sites at a later date. This must have taken you so much time to write. Well done.
Oh this is such a fab list and so helpful – thank you! I am saving this for future reference!!
I usually use Pexels and Pixabay, and I usually find what I’m looking for (not always though). It’s also useful to search in google images but specify usage rights. I’m a student and can’t afford buying pictures so yeah, this is the way to go. Also, for my own personal site/blog I try to use all original photos. Thank you for all the resources though!
Wow. This is a great resource. I use my own photos as much as possible, but sometimes, I have to use photos from other sources. Thanks for collating all the information you’ve provided in this post.
You are amazing! I’m always stuck for images for certain posts and always relied on one website but they never had what I wanted! This list will help me out so much. Thank you for sharing
This is a great and very comprehensive list, I really believe this will be so helpful to me and others in the future.
Hey, Manoj! As usual, you’ve compiled an incredible list that deserves to be bookmarked. So far, I haven’t struggled with finding images for my site since I do my own photography. But I understand it might come in handy in the future.
this is very helpful! sometimes I realize I didn’t end up with a good shot so I always Google free stock images to find a nicer photo. I’ll be checking these out
Wow, an amazing list of free images. Such a handy post for most x