7 Sites with Free Stock Photos for Your Social Media or Blog
Beautiful photos enhance every part of your marketing strategy – from blog posts and social media graphics, to website slideshows and ad campaigns. But if you don’t have a huge photography budget, it can be a struggle to find high-quality images that fit your brand’s needs.
You can search Creative Commons images hosted on Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, but it often takes forever to sift through mediocre shots to find what you’re looking for. And if you need an image you can use for commercial purposes without attribution, this tedious search gets even more frustrating.
Fortunately, there’s a growing number of free stock photography sites that actually offer gorgeous collections of photos. Here are seven of our favorite stock photo sites: all feature high-resolution, professional images that are free to use without attribution, under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. So whether you need a stock image of a hip coffee shop or a luxurious tropical beach, you can download it quickly and painlessly.
Pixabay has an inventory of more than 1 million photos, illustrations and vector graphics. Its search functionality is robust, allowing you to filter by image type, category and colors. And the site’s editor’s choice section highlights some of their best options.
Pexels solicits user-generated content, and its more than 30,000 images showcase diverse subjects and locations. You can check out the collections of the site’s most popular photographers, and browse images by color palette.
Death to Stock Photo is a membership-based service. When you sign up, you receive your first free photo pack; after that, you’ll get one every month. Each pack is well-curated and inspired by a specific theme. The site also has a premium membership; for a monthly or yearly fee, you can have access to all of its images.
Kaboompics is the brainchild of a single photographer, and her photos have been downloaded more than 4 million times. You can browse by category – such as Travel, Interiors or Business – and do an advanced search by keyword, color or orientation.
Unsplash is a community-based stock photo website that offers more than 200,000 images. You can browse vast themed collections in its Explore section.
Fancycrave is another subscription stock photography service. Sign up, and you’ll receive 14 free photos a week via email.
Contributing photographers upload hundreds of new images every week to StockSnap. You can search by keyword, or sort by categories, trending and most-viewed images.
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