High quality images are important on a website and while many know the sources to purchase stock images from sources like Getty Image, Shutterstock, iStock, etc.. Here we recommend a few stock sources we think offer very creative images for free. Of course, created image content is always ideal.
It is also to read the licensing rights of some of the free images available as some are specifically indicated for non-commercial use. So do read carefully.
One of our favourite source of free stock images because all of their photos are professionally curated. They have an excellent open search function and the website’s interface is extremely easy to use. Big brands such as Huffington Post, Forbes, Fast Company use editorial their images. The website contains more than 800,000 photos from many talented contributors from around the world.
Many of our clients appear to use images from here for their blogs, news, etc. Pexel manages all licensing rather than their contributors. Their website is extremely well designed making the interface very easy to use with their accurate tagging model. Images are all high quality and very creative. To add to their amazing offering, Pexels also offers free stock video footage (https://www.pexels.com/videos/).
The website offers over 1 million stock images as per their website. While we personally have used this website often, we found the image tagging to be very accurate. The only problem we noticed recently is the website is often slow and the video search bar does not display any videos.
We’ll start by saying we agree Raw Pixel has the most diverse collection of stock photos in both free and licensed images. We like their well designed website and their contributors create commercial level image content. However, it’s important to note the website limits downloads to 5 free images per day.
The mecca of stock image content because they have everything from photography to animated illustrations. We like Pixabay mostly because they have best search filter function in the list. Possibly the only one with a faceted navigation feature that makes finding what you’re looking for in their gigantic 1.5 million stock image inventory. Pixabay is also the only provider in the list to offer free vectors and illustrations which is ideal for content creators.
You can download the content for free or offer the contributors coffee through a donation using Paypal or Skrill. From our own experience, we found Stockvault best-offered landscape and background images. The tagging features are excellent as every image is very well labeled. From our experience, we found some of their images to be low quality. The licensing uses of the images are a little stricter than most of the other sources, so be sure to read the license detail.
Probably the smallest free image collection of the list, but the curation of the images is very high quality. They also possess many wonderful theme collections. While the theme collections are not free, we personally found the monthly membership fee worth the time saved with the way they structured delivering images. For example, if you are creating content on the new iPhone XS, there is literally an entire collection that is beautifully shot from a contributor right here (https://picjumbo.com/premium/iphone-xs/).
Photo by Radek Grzybowski on Unsplash