5 Great Websites for Free Stock Photos

Finding the perfect stock photo for a web or print project can be tricky if you’re a designer, developer, or even a casual blogger. It can be tempting to scour Google Images to find a terrific image, but please don’t! Most of the time, these images are not free for your use (whether personal or commercial), so it’s wise to skip Google altogether.

Instead, why not try some of these totally free alternatives? Check out the list below and let me know if any of these work for you (or if you know of any other great alternatives)!

1. stock.xchng

Image Credit: Conqueror by user bertvthul

Looking for an amazing free image gallery or interested in sharing your photos with others? Then this is your site!

stock.xchng gives users the option to browse through categories or to search their galleries of over 350,000 quality stock photos from over 30,000 photographers.

While some images are certainly better than others, this site is my personal favorite starting point in my quest for free stock photos. Register for a free account, and happy downloading!

2. Stock Vault

Image Credit: Birds on Dome by user nasir rauf

Stock Vault is another wonderful and totally free stock photo site featuring over 40,000 high quality user-submitted images! The site encourages photographers and designers to share photos, graphics, and image files, creating a great resource for everyone to enjoy.

Stock Vault has plenty of basic categories to sort the images by, along with a more detailed search option.

3. Unsplash

Image Credit: Untitled by Jean Kleisz

Unsplash is a rather new free image site, but it’s quickly becoming one of my personal favorites! This awesome site features ten new totally free, high-resolution photos every ten days. You are free to do whatever you’d like with these downloads.

Unfortunately, there is no great way to search the site, other than to just take a peak around. But, it’s totally worth the time spent hunting once you uncover some of these beauties!

4. Morgue File

Image Credit: Untitled by user rosevita

Morgue File is another great resource for free stock images, featuring a community of amazing photographers sharing their work!

The images can easily be searched and can also be filtered by tags like popular, new, and last downloaded.

5. Freepixels

Image Credit: Untitled from Freepixels Landscape Gallery

Freepixels is the final free stock photo resource in this roundup and, with over 5,000 photos in 40 categories, it’s definitely worth checking out for your next web or print project!

Freepixels has a great category breakdown of the site’s image library, along with a standard search functionality.

Reminder: some images require the photographer’s permission to use in commercial works. Please read the license carefully and ALWAYS obtain the appropriate permissions before utilizing a photo! Be sure to also check out the terms of use on each of these websites.

Photo Cred: Daniel Friesenecker on pixabay.com

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