Top 5 Free Stock Photo Websites
Free public domain images can be a great resource for anyone. But when using them for commercial use, you must be extremely vigilant about double-checking the license and terms of each image you want to use. For free commercial use, a CC0 license is a safe alternative from expensive professional photography.
What is a Creative Commons 0 license?
CC0 is free to use for both commercial and personal projects. It’s sometimes hard to find reliable websites for quality photos, vector graphics, and fonts that are free to download. Luckily, there are many artists who license their work for the world to use freely with no strings attached. This is a CC0 license. (If you want to read more about CC0 licensing, you can go to the Creative Commons website.) Check out our favorite websites to find free stock photos below!
Pexels.com Pexels is one of my go-to websites to find great photos quickly. You can browse photos by color, popularity, leaderboard, or most recently added. Pexels’ friendly integration options set it apart from the crowd with the Adobe Photoshop plugin, Google Chrome extension, or Mac/Windows plugin for desktops. This allows for seamless access their photo library while you’re working.
Pixabay.com Pixabay is a community of photographers that have uploaded a massive collection of high quality public domain photos, illustrations, vectors and videos released under CC0. You can browse by photographer, type of camera and “Editor’s Choice.” You can also filter by orientation, category, size and color.
Unsplash.com Unsplash photographers were sick of “traditional” stock imagery, so they decided to offer their own high-resolution images for free. All photos on the site can be copied, modified and distributed under CC0, without you having to ask permission or provide attribution. Unsplash is a little bit more difficult to search than some of the others on this list, but they also have beautiful photos that can really make your work stand out.
Skitterphoto.com Skitter is probably one of the easiest websites to browse by categories. For example, some of the categories include: animals, business/finance, travel, food, etc. Another key feature that Skitterphoto provides is the number of downloads for each photo and all of the camera information such as make/model, date taken, lens, aspect ratio, and size.
Vexels.com Vexels is a new website offering vectors, transparent PNGs, PSDs and editable designs. You can search through +50 categories to find just the perfect graphic. Vexels’ Editables are pre-designed templates for advertisements, social media posts, certificates, cards, logos, and more which can come in super handy for free, quick designs for non-professionals.
Some of these free public domain image websites will take time to look through and research, but there’s a lot of amazing images in them that are worth finding.
Do you have another website that should be added to this list? Let us know in the comments below!