When you’re embarking on a creative project, you’d ideally have the budget to commission bespoke photography shoots to perfectly fit your brief. But not every client can afford that kind of money, so sometimes you need to find a more affordable alternative. You won’t find a massive selection at Gratisography, and that’s not what this site is all about. Instead, you’ll find interesting photos that stand out from those at other sites.
You can search by color or hex color code, which can bring photo results that match the exact colors you’re searching for. It’s always worth checking before you download a photo though, as there may be exceptions. And if you’re a budding photographer yourself, you can even click Camera Finder under the Explore dropdown to see the most popular cameras currently being used in the Flickr community. There are a number of different categories and collections you can browse through, and of course, you can also search the site. You don’t need to be logged in to download at Pixabay, but there are a few advantages to creating a free account and logging in.
Ceramic artist Stephanie H Shih recreates food products in clay to explore cultural identity
Here you can get royalty-free stock photos for as little as 17p per download, as well as illustrations, videos and audio. Vecteezy is a website that offers millions of stock vector graphics, illustrations, and icons to download for free, as long as attribution is given. There’s also a premium subscription service that provides access to additional assets, removing the need for attribution and adding features such as legal indemnification.
Bloggers, influencers, and content creators also need lots of photos and images. Thankfully, there are several websites that offer outstanding collections of photos and images that can be downloaded and used at no cost. Here, we’ll highlight the best free stock photo websites that will prove to be valuable resources for your work. Freepik is another great choice if you’re looking for a stock photo site with extremely detailed filter options. The site offers images, videos, vectors, AI images, icons, fonts, and more. And the filter choices let you narrow your search results by asset type, license, AI-generated, file type, and even color and orientation.
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Their emphasis on “class instead of mass” has led them to become one of the world’s leading names in premium lifestyle photography. In 2013, the site launched as a simple Tumblr blog with a small number of photos added each week. With thousands of visitors coming to the site, Unsplash began adding many more photos. They also opened up submissions so other photographers could upload their own free stock photos.
At the time of writing, the collection has several shots of architecture in London, so it’s worth checking out this guide to intellectual property and the London skyline before using these. Pexels is a particularly good choice for web or app designers, with an excellent set of device images that are ideal for displaying interface mockups. A couple of images stray close to stock photo cheesiness (ideas that are tricky to illustrate spelled out with scrabble tiles, for example), but the vast majority are creative and original. Keep in mind that you can’t use every photo you find on Flickr for free—especially for commercial use.
Best free stock photo site of 2024
Picjumbo is different from the other sites on this list because most of the photos are taken by a single photographer, Viktor Hanacek. Don’t let that fool you though, there are still thousands of photos on the site, and you’ll love the quality of this free stock photography. And although they make up a small fraction of Adobe’s overall stock photography offering, the selection of free content is still very significant. In addition to the free stock photos, Canva also offers an even bigger selection of premium stock photos (more than 100 million) that can be accessed through a Canva Pro subscription.
The tool’s additional plugins also let you access and edit stock photos directly from within Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD, Figma, or Sketch. Finding images that are free for commercial use isn’t as hard as it might best stock photography for designers sound, thanks to a number of sites that aggregate photos, illustrations, and vectors. These sites usually let you search and filter by keyword or category, making it easy to find what you’re looking for.
Best for amateur photographers
You’ll find more than 2.5 million free resources here, including photos, videos, music, and vectors. Currently, Canva does not offer videos, vectors, or other types of creative content, aside from the templates that use Canva’s design software. Unsplash is a popular resource because they have a huge collection and because the photos are, for the most part, high-quality. Most of the photos you’ll find at Unsplash don’t have the stereotypical stock photo look that everyone wants to avoid.
Founded in 1995, Getty is the OG of modern stock libraries and boasts a collection of over 200 million assets, including photographs, videos, and music tracks. It offers a range of licensing options for its assets, which can be used for various creative and editorial purposes. But while the quality is typically high, the prices for both subscriptions and credit packs are too. The free stock photos you’ll find at Deposit Photos are professional-quality high-resolution images. Like Adobe Stock, Deposit Photos is another leading stock photo site that offers a nice selection of free stock photos, videos, and vectors.
AI is revolutionizing most online spaces, and stock photos are no exception. With the advent of generative AI, it’s possible to feed your exact specifications into an AI image generator like Midjourney and get a unique, often sophisticated, result. The ability to generate fresh new photos that match your exact needs might mean stock photos will soon become a thing of the past. Our best apps roundups are written by humans who’ve spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We’re never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review.
The quantity of photos at PikWizard is pretty good, although not as significant as what you’ll find from the sites at the top of our list. PikWizard is under the same ownership as DesignWizard, which offers online design software. Conveniently, you can take a photo from PikWizard straight to the DesignWizard editor. For those who use Canva’s design software, the photos are very easy and convenient to use and add to your designs.
Pixabay
Run a search for an image, and then click the Any license dropdown menu and select Commercial use allowed. And unlike most free image sites, New Old Stock doesn’t offer any way to filter photos. If you’re feeling lucky, though, click the magnifying glass in the upper-left corner of the site, type in a search phrase, and you may strike (vintage) gold. With more than five million photos and multiple plugins, Unsplash is one of the most easily accessible and largest collections of stock photos available. Not everyone has the time or inclination to learn how to create prompts to get the results they want—and even then, AI-generated photos aren’t consistent in quality or relevance.
- You’ll find millions of free stock photos, videos, and vector graphics at Vecteezy.
- With many stock users creating content for businesses, being able to secure commercial and non-commercial rights is critical.
- In 2021, Unsplash was acquired by Getty Images, but Unsplash continues to provide free photos to designers, content creators, and anyone else looking for free images.