Getting your hands on quality images is pretty easy to do, there’s lots of stock photography providers if you’re willing to pay for them. If however you’re working on a tight budget or bootstrapping, supply is much more limited, and generally the quality of free images is poor, unless you’re happy with cheesy amateurish photos. I would recommend avoiding the use of poor quality imagery with any of your work as this reflects poorly on you and your business.
So if you’re looking for images for a blog post, or presentation and you don’t want to pay a penny, i have some good news for you. Below are six sites that provide high quality royalty free photos for FREE, check them out for yourself. The image at the top of this blog post is from one of the sites, so you get a sense of what’s on offer.
Pixabay is site I stumbled upon, try to download a couple of images, the higher resolution images require you to create an account, but the lower resolution images 1920 x 1280 can be downloaded without an account. Some of the images are very good. Images are “Free for commercial use” and “No attribution required”.
Gratisography – free use as you please, high resolution pictures for personal and commercial projects. Just click on your selection and download the high resolution version. New pictures added weekly. No copyright restrictions.
ISO Republic stock photography provides high quality, free photos for creatives covering architecture, nature, people, textrues, urban and more. It’s aimed at designers and developers who don’t have the budget for quality photos.
Magdeleine is a photo gallery for your inspiration. Magdeleine offer a daily pick and feature high resolution pictures
New Old Stock – Vintage photos from the public archives free of known copyright restrictions
PicJumbo – Totally free photos for your commercial and personal work. Only limitations include redistributing and selling
Stocksnap.io – Beautiful free stock photos with hundreds added weekly. No attribution required either.
Gutenberg,org – Public domain – offers over 49,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. Many of which are free from copyright (in USA). As public domain you can repackage this content in any number of ways to create your own products (check copyright law in your country first)
ulib.org Public domain with lots of free content
StockSnap – they offer beautiful, high quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of.
Pexels – Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through our discover pages.
Unsplash – Probably the best known of the free stock sites.
Burst – Burst was launched by Shopify to help new businesses find quality images for their marketing.
Foodiesfeed – Looking for high quality, mouth watering food photography, Foodiesfeed is where it’s at.
kaboompics – Kaboompics is one of the most popular sources of free images for lifestyle, interior design and specialised bloggers in World.