If you want a photo or image on a specific topic, you’ll want a site
that’s searchable. Here are a few to check out. (To better help you
evaluate these sites, I performed the same search on each using the word
“coffee.”)
Dreamstime offers a free section that’s searchable and frequently updated. It requires you to create a (free) account.
Free Digital Photos
houses a wealth of free images—categorized and searchable—for business,
personal or educational use. They’re smaller sized, and larger versions
are available to purchase. Using the free images often requires a
credit to the photographer and the site like the one you see below.
Image Credit: khunaspix via FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Free Images
is a large gallery of more than 350,000 stock photos, searchable and
categorized. Downloading a photo does require a longer-than-most signup
process but the bigger selection might be worth it.
Free Range Stock offers access to free high-quality, high-resolution stock photos. A (free) registration is required.
Free Photos Bank
has a nice collection of free photos available for download without
login. They’re extensively categorized with a few different ways to
search, too.
ImageFree‘s
registered users can download both free and paid images to use in
corporate and personal projects. The free selection seems fairly
limited, though—my “coffee” search didn’t turn up a free photo I could
use.
IM Free
offers a curated collection of free resources, all for commercial use.
Search for a keyword or browse through the stylishly crafted categories.
Morguefile
contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in
creative projects by visitors to the site. A short registration is
required, and morguefile asks that users credit the photographer when
possible.
Pixabay
offers copyright-free, cost-free images published under Creative
Commons. You can copy, modify, distribute and use the images, even for
commercial purposes. No registration is required.
Public Domain Pictures is a repository for a wide variety of free
public domain
images uploaded by amateur photographers. A brief signup is required.
(Premium download is an option if you need larger images.)
Stockvault
is a stock photo sharing website where photographers, designers and
students can share their photographs, graphics and image files with each
other for free and use them for personal and non-commercial design
work. No registration is required.
Rgbstock
is a free stock image site created by photographers and graphic
artists. Registration (required) is one-click and the pool of photos is
pretty deep.
Free-form photo collections
“Bloggers often look for specificity with the images they use on
posts when they could see similar results from simply choosing
high-quality photos,” says David Sherry of Death to The Stock Photo.
His service and others in this category offer a more freewheeling approach to images—no searching but lots of discovery.
Since there’s no search in this category, I’ve picked a representative image for each service.
Ancestry Images
offers a free image archive of historical prints, maps and artifact
photos, like this print of a New Zealand Maori Warrior from 1817.
BigFoto
is a royalty-free photo gallery in which most of the photos have been
contributed by amateur photographers. No login is required. It’s
organized mainly by geographic area—for example, this photo is from the
“Copenhagen” collection.
Gratisography
is a collection of free high-resolution images for personal or
commercial use. New photos are added weekly; simply click to download.
Death to The Stock Photo offers free high-res lifestyle photography sent to you monthly.
FreeMediaGoo
offers royalty-free, cost-free media that can be used in print, film,
TV, Internet or any other type of media both for commercial and personal
use. There’s no login required but the inventory is slightly more
limited, organized into unique categories like “beach backgrounds” and
“concrete textures.”
18.) Hubspot
It’s not a photo source per se, but marketing platform
Hubspot often offers packages of
free photos in exchange for your email address.
19.) iStock
iStock releases new a new batch of
free stock images every week. (Signup for a free membership—a slightly confusing process—is required.)
Little Visuals
delivers 7 high-res images to use anyway you want via email every 7
days. Subjects range from industrial parts to idyllic landscapes.
New Old Stock is a collection of vintage photos from the public archives, free of known copyright restrictions.
PicJumbo
offers a variety of free photos for any kind of use—free of charge with
no registration required. Although there’s no search function,
categories will help you find your way.
Pickupimage
is a large collection of free stock images mostly focusing on nature-
and outdoor-related scenes that can be copied, modified an
distributed—even for commercial purposes. No registration necessary!
Since the pool isn’t too broad this site didn’t pass the “coffee”
search, but here’s a sample of what you can find there.
Superfamous houses the work of Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter, whose photography is available under the conditions of a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means that you can use the work for your own purposes — including commercial use — as long as credit is provided.
Unsplash offers 10 free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos every 10 days.
Wikimedia Commons is a database of 21,049,775 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. The
images are painstakingly organized but the classifications may not be super clear if you’re not a big Wikipedia user (I’m not).
Photo search tools
These sites don’t offer free photos themselves but rather provide a
way to search easily through Flickr or public domain photos to more
quickly find a photo you can use.
Can We Image searches and displays results from Wikimedia Commons. All search results link directly to the resource’s usage rights page.
Compfight is a Flickr image search engine that uses the Flickr API to locate images based on your license needs.
Creative Commons Search
is a sort of photo search engine clearinghouse that offers access to
search services provided by other organizations like Flickr and Google.
For example, searching for “kittens” on Creative Commons Search and
selecting Google Images brings me here. Note that the search has been
set up with special parameters.
Foter is a Flickr-focused search tool that helps quickly unearth photos and identify their licenses.
Google Advanced Image Search is a method of finding free-to-use images through Google’s own search tools. Here’s a
quick guide.
Every Stock Photo
is a search engine for free photos. These come from many sources and
are license-specific. You can view a photo’s license by clicking on the
license icon, below and left of photos. Membership is free and allows
you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos.
Image Finder
allows users to search Creative Commons photos from Flickr with similar
filters for commercial/non-commercial and other categories.
PhotoPin‘s interface allows users to search millions of Creative Commons photos from Flickr.
StockPhotos.io
is a Creative Commons-licensed professional free stock photos sharing
community of about 25,000 images. All photos displayed on this
Pinterest-esque site are allowed for commercial use with proper credits
to the authors.
TinEye
is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came
from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or
if there is a higher resolution version.
Wylio is an all-in-one picture finder, re-sizer and attribution builder for bloggers. Users can resize up to 5 free images per month.
Create-your-own image tools
For options beyond readymade images, consider the many tools
available to help even the design-challenged among us create attractive,
original images.
is one we particularly turn to often for creating new images to
accompany Buffer’s blog posts. This tool allows users to search for the
best graphics, photos, and fonts (or upload your own) then use Canva’s
drag-and-drop tool to create a new design.
