If you want to find free photos for your website, blog posts, social media, online or print advertising, you could end up paying a lot of money when you just don’t need to.
Here are 7 sites I frequently use to find free photos which are high quality, free of copyright and available to use for any purpose whatsoever, under the Creative Commons Licence CC0.
This site makes it easy to find free photos! It offers over 650,000 free images – photos, backgrounds, vectors and illustrations. You don’t have to have an account to download the images; you can offer a monetary contribution if you wish; you are not required to give an attribution when you use an image, but no one will complain if you do! It’s a great site for general images of all types, but for best results use the search facility and the filters to find what you’re looking for.
Here are Pixabay’s FAQs to ensure you fully understand how you may use their images.
An image from Pixabay
This site has fewer images than Pixabay but they are more select and, I suppose, more artistic in their style. Unsplash is especially great for breath-taking scenery shots and images of people which manage to convey powerful emotion often without even showing a face. Great for thought-provoking images which have a real sense of atmosphere, mood and place. Sign up for free to recieve 10 images every 10 days, directly to your inbox.
An image from Unsplash
Gratisography is owned by Ryan McGuire, a web designer and photographer who very kindly allows the world to use his photos gratis! His site is great for quirky, unusual images as well as some great mainstream stuff. As with all 3 sites, you can give him credit if you feel like doing so, and you can even give him a tip or ‘buy him a coffee’ via Paypal as both Ryan’s site and Pixabay suggest you might like to.
Here are his terms.
An image from Gratisography
Images on Designers Pics are listed under 10 categories, including People, Architecture, Business & Technology. The images are colourful and simple, often with plenty of space to add captions. Jeshu, who owns Designer Pics asks simply that you share his site to thank him!
An image from Designers Pics
The images on this site are taken by Swede, Jonas Wimmerstrom. Although there are far fewer than on some other sites, because it’s just one person’s work, they tend to be more individual and you won’t see the same image on 100s of other websites. He seems especially to enjoy countryside and landscape photography, although I love this one:
An image from Cupcake
Pexels, like Pixabay, is a site where anyone can upload photos which can then be used under the CC0 licence. It also seems to pull photos from other similar sites, such as Pixabay. One feature I especially like on Pexels is the ability to search by colour (go to ‘Browse’ on the top right of the screen – on a PC – and choose that option).
An image from Pexels
Although Negative Space doesn’t boast 1000s of photos, it does have some useful categories, which you don’t see everywhere. I especially like the Black & White category and the Abstract category.
An image from Negative Space
So, now you have 7 more places to visit when you need to find free photos for use absolutely anywhere you like! Please share this post if you’ve found it useful, and let me know which sites you use for licence-free images.
I was completely relying on Pexels and Pixabay for my image requirements. Now, with this info you have shared I have so many to choose from. Really helpful. Thanks 🙂