10 Free Designer Approved Stock Image Sites
- Taylor Walden
- Nov 19, 2019
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 18, 2020
Whether you're a student, a designer, or a business, chances are at some point you're going to require high quality photography. While creating your own original shots can be great and give you a sense of accomplishment, not all of us have a photographer's finesse. Thankfully, over the last couple of years there have been multiple photography communities popping up across the web with high quality photos that are available for free.
In this article, I've curated a list of websites with free stock photos that I've used personally in my career.
A Note About Licenses
Many of these photographs are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. In short, you can copy, modify, distribute and perform work with photos from these sites, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
Although I've gone through most of these sites already, some photos may require attribution. So be sure you to do your own research during your projects to determine how these images can be used best.
With that out of the way, let’s dive into this list!
1. Unsplash
What started out as a Tumblr blog for creatives back in 2013 is now an industry-leading photography community that is overflowing with amazing stock options. Unsplash is a personal favorite of mine, as I've been using their service since I was in college. There are over 1 million photos currently available on Unsplash's site and they are all 100% free for both commercial and non-commercial use with no attributions required.
2. Pexels
Another one of my personal favorites and college throwbacks is Pexels. Founded in 2014, Pexels provides thousands of hand-picked photos for creators to use as they please. All photos uploaded to the site fall under the Pexels license, which means you can use them for both personal and commercial purposes without attribution. To read more about their license, go to www.pexels.com/photo-license/ where they go into detail about what their license covers as well as answer some frequently asked questions about their service.
Founded by entrepreneurs and Snappa developers Christopher Gimmer and Marc Chouinard, StockSnap.io strives to offer photography that stands apart from other stock image sites. This website has thousands of free, high-resolution images that are free from copyright restrictions under the Creative Commons CC0 license. No attribution is required, thus you are free to use any images from their site to fit your creative needs.
4. Reshot
If you're tired of using images that scream stock photo from a mile away, this next one is perfect for you. Reshot, like many of the services on this list, is made up of a community of amateur photographers who are offering their best images for free. All the images available on Reshot are free to use for commercial and non-commercial use with no attribution required.
5. Burst by Shopify
Burst is a resource from Shopify that provides free stock photos. However, this site is a little different from the rest. While most of these sites use the same license for all their photos, Burst licenses some of their photos under the CC0 license while others fall under Shopify’s own photo license.
Burst was originally launched to help entrepreneurs make better products, websites, and marketing campaigns and their photos reflect just that. Most of the photos were originally taken in-house and are themed around business niches, however you can still find more generalized photos here as well.
6. Kaboompics
Another personal favorite of mine is Kaboompics but it's not just because of the photography that is available. Kaboompics stands out among the rest because of the additional features that are on each photo page. Not only are all the photos free for both commercial and non-commercial use each photo page includes a color palette based off of the image as well as all the photos from that photo shoot. While the color palette section might not be useful to everyone, as a graphic designer, I love it and it makes my life just a little bit easier.
To top it all off, Kaboompics is also a "one woman show" which is amazing in and of itself. Despite the site being run by a single person, it has made its way to being one of the most popular sources of free images for lifestyle, interior design, and specialized bloggers. It's definitely worth browsing if you're looking to market toward a young audience.
7. Negative Space
Let's make our way back to another amazing photography community. Negative Space serves as a platform for photographers to share their work for other creatives to use under the CC0 license. This photo library is full of beautiful images that you can search by colors, copy space positions, or categories. This platform is continuously growing, so you're sure to find shots for your designs without having to worry about attribution or licensing.
8. Picography
While Picography is a relatively small photo resource, it makes up for it in quality. This platform is full of spectacular images of nature and other scenery as well as some more general images like technology. All the photos are licensed under CC0, so you can use them for free without any attribution. Picography also features an easy-to-use search function and a category dropdown so you can more easily find what you're looking for.
9. ISO Republic
While all these websites offer free stock images, ISO Republic also offers curated collections of high-resolution CC0 videos that are free for both personal and commercial use. If the free stock video wasn't enough to sell you on ISO Republic, they also have a newsletter subscription that is full of exclusive free stocks that are delivered straight to your inbox.
10. Pixabay
This next one is by far the mother of all free stock sites. Over the last eight years, Pixabay has been one of the biggest resources for high definition images, video, illustrations, and vectors. Everything is released under CC0 license which means you can use anything you download without permission or attribution for both commercial and non-commercial projects. With over 1 million submissions available, Pixabay is a definite go-to for just about every image you could ever need. If all else fails, go to Pixabay.
In Conclusion
There are many other great free stock image sites for you to choose from that I did not include on this list. In no way am I trying to say that these 10 are the best or that you should be using these no matter what. This article is intended solely to provide a resource from one creative to another.
Feel free to comment down below with any sites that you feel should have made the list to continue to add to this resource. Also, make sure to leave a link to any projects that were created using one of the sites mentioned in this article, as I would love to see them!
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