26 of the Best Free Stock Photo Sites to Use in 2024

Get creative, experimental, and weird with these unique stock photo collections. Born of a pilot project with the Library of Congress, Flickr Commons has a noble mission, which is to share as many public photographs with the world as possible. And every one of them is classified as having no known copyright restrictions. Created in 2013, Picjumbo has a vast collection of images submitted by photographers and travelers, and all are high resolution, great quality, and totally free. Hundreds of new options are uploaded daily, so there’s always fresh material. She is editor-at-large for Western Living and Vancouver Magazine, author of the National Magazine Award-nominated ‘City Informer’ column, and a regular contributor to Dwell.

The secret of Kaboompics’ success is working in the sophisticated intricacies of photography. You can download resources used in photo productions, such as color palettes and composition materials. Rawpixel searches for original digital collections all over the world to fuel its free collection, and the results are bursting with creativity and authenticity.

Free Images

It’s a mixed bag, but they’re all beautiful… and, as you probably guessed, they’re all free. Pixabay serves as a repository for a ton of quality photos that were released into the public domain under Creative Commons CC0. This collection of vintage photos comes from the public archive via Flickr Commons.

This site was founded by talented photographer Karoline Grabowska and has over 17,000 exquisite photos, many of which are in the interior design and lifestyle category. If you’re looking for stock photography sites that are out of the ordinary, check out Gratisography, certainly one of the most innovative stock photo sites on the web. You’ll find photo essays, editorials, photojournalism, historical photos, 4K and HD videos, music, graphic design resources, and other media produced by hundreds of thousands of creators. Stocksy is a cooperative of creatives offering authentic photos and videos produced by industry professionals.

Unique stock photo websites

To prove it, we’ve compiled a list of awesome resources for free, high-quality stock images for websites, blogs, and similar online properties. If you plan on creating your own image but want a head start, Vecteezy is a good resource. Here, you can find free vector art along with stock photos and videos. The search function allows you to search for both photo and video at the same time or filter by one or the other. Vecteezy is one of the most popular platforms for designers, marketers, and freelancers, but even major brands are known to use it on occasion. With millions of hand-selected, high-quality photos, vectors, videos, and illustrations, it’s easy to understand why.

With commonly used photo categories like business, school, nature, and travel, you have quite a few options of high-resolution photos to choose from. Some of these do link out to Shutterstock (a paid stock image website), which can be a bit annoying. One downside — though Unsplash has many high-quality free stock photos for designers photos, the site’s popularity can be a detriment with many of these images appearing in other blogs and websites over and over. If you’re on the hunt for photos with impeccable color palettes, composition, and impressive use of negative space, you’ll find more than a few on Kaboompics.

websites for brand design inspiration with examples

The footer of the website includes links to trending photo topics as well. While there are plenty of photos and videos to choose from, you’ll still see Shutterstock ads throughout the site, subtly marked by a gray background behind the assets. If you don’t want to pay for Shutterstock assets, be sure to stick to Iso Republic’s collections. Here are 17 stock photography websites that offer a wide range of images you can use.

Another popular site for creators looking for high-quality photos and stock videos is Pixabay. Pixabay has over 2.6 million high-quality images and videos free for personal and commercial purposes. The site is easy to use and has quality filters to help you find what you’re looking for. Adobe Stock has a library of over 100 million high-resolution images, all of which are integrated into Creative Cloud. For designers and illustrators, finding, purchasing, and using Adobe Stock’s imagery is quick and easy.

Adobe Stock

The perfect image can solidify your design, article, ad, or other creative. Whatever your need, there are many resources for free stock photos out there. As the name implies, the Natural Women Collection simply shows everyday women in their daily lives — working out, hanging with friends, and hugging their pets. And while it’s not a curated collection, it’s worth mentioning that the search results for “nonbinary” in Canva’s stock photo library produces nearly 1,000 free photos to choose from as well. Pixabay boasts a large collection of not just stock videos and photos, but also music, sound effects, illustrations, and vectors. Another great royalty-free image website you can use is picjumbo with galleries of fantastic free photos you can choose from.

• All these free stock photo websites kind of look the same too… it’s like one endless collection.
• No restrictions on any of the ISO Republic photography — download to your hearts’ content and get to posting.
• You might be the most amazing social media manager in the world, with an impeccable social strategy and well-honed posting schedule — but that doesn’t mean you know how to take a picture.

The leaderboard gives you direct access to check out the collected works of some of their greatest contributors. They also set up challenges for photographers to participate in, putting out calls for photos based around themes or subject matter, with the opportunity to win prizes for their work. If you stumble upon a rare image that’s too small or overprocessed, Vintage Stock Photos can help you re-scan and remaster it. There are also over 200,000 royalty-free illustrations for designers and illustrators to use freely, too. Most recently, Pixabay moved into the sound space and now offers hundreds of free sound effects and music.

Little Visuals

Not only is there a lot to choose from, but the photos are high quality, too. “Images provided directly (in-house) by Freerange Stock originate one of two ways. All the images are tiled immediately for you to view, a simplistic design that fits the needs of almost any industry. Premium members will gain full access to premium content and a higher download cap per day without the need for any attribution. From architecture to technology, Negative Space‘s continuously growing collection of images is one you’ll find yourself tapping into again and again. You’ll find minimalist black and white icons along with colorful, cartoonish ones.

The downside is, they really are ALL over the web, including your competitor’s websites. Not a great place to be looking if you’re reading this round-up just before lunch, FYI. Shopify wants its clients to have nice looking websites, so they’ve helped ‘em out with a collection of sleek, high-quality photos.

How to Use Creative Commons to Find Free Images

It features images of hundreds of different categories, including people, animals, nature, technology, and more. Vecteezy is a U.S.-based online marketplace that provides access to over 30M free and premium stock photos, vector graphics, and video footage. It can be hard to find stock photos that look good and fit right with your designs. And searching for the best free stock images when you’re in the middle of creating a design can be frustrating. High-quality photos and graphics are an essential aspect of web design.

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