Apart from quality content, it is important that we must take care of the presentation of the article too. To enhance any article presentation you should add a relevant image to the article because:
[Tweet “A picture is worth a thousand words”]You might have noticed that we use images with all the articles in our blog to make articles more attractive. There are many images available online but it is important that you use only those images on your blog or for other projects which are allowed by the owner to be used.
I’m not going to talk about image licensing here and straight away share my list of Websites to download free stock photos. Yah, you heard me right and it’s completely free.
Thanks to all the commentators who have made this list more resourceful by suggesting many other free stock images website. I suggest you do check comment section and feel free to suggest one which you are using for your use. These images can be used for commercial purposes as well.
Free Stock Images Websites for Commercial or Blogging use:
1. FreePik
FreePik is most popular website in 2020 to download free pictures. It is a freemium website that offers free + paid images, and it definitely stand out from the rest.
It offers modern vector images, characters which will make your website or landing pages stand out.
2. Gratisography:
I discovered this website in February 2016 & since then I’m in love with this website. Unlike other sites, here you can download the high-quality images & use it for your personal & professional projects without giving any credits. Yah! You heard me right. And the quality of images you gonna find here is par excellence.
3. Pixabay:
After trying Gratisography, I got really includes to use beautiful looking stock images. The one with more colors & emotions. I believe in 2020 & in the coming years, we will see a lot of trends around it in the stock image industry.
You should also bookmark Pixabay as it offers a wide range of images from people all around the world. These images are free to use even for commercial use. Attribution is not required.
4. Pexels:
This site is suggested by Shouter Dipal & it looks pretty solid. All pictures here are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, that means you can use these images for commercial uses too.
The CC0 license was released by the non-profit organization Creative Commons (CC). Every month they add 1500 new HQ photos & right now they boast about having more than 10k+ pics.
5. Stocksnap:
This is another free stock photos site where you can download high quality pictures for free. All images are licensed under CCO license (Same as above).
6. Flickr
Flickr is one of my favorite websites to search and download free images for websites. It has a huge database of royalty-free images and whenever I am in a hurry to download any image for my article then Flickr is the website that I visit.
To download any image you just need to visit creative common category and search for the image, you will get lots of relevant images of different size and you can download any image which suits your article. You can read more about Flickr in the following articles:
Search for free stock photos using Flickr advanced search
7. MorgueFile
Morgue File is one of the best free Stock image sites, which makes it easy to search the images via category. You can select the category of images to make more relevant search. It have clean and clutter-free landing page and easy navigation. It gives you option to crop the image at same time and makes it easy to post on your blog. You can read more about MorgueFile in the review of MorgueFile.
[ Link ]8. FreeRangeStock
You can download images from FreeRangeStock for personal and commercial use. To download images you need to do a quick and free registration on FreeRangeStock website.
Apart from downloading images, if you are a photographer then you can also upload the images and earn money with their Adsense revenue sharing program.
You can also edit directly on Pixlr before downloading it on your computer. The only thing which you might not like about Free Range stock is the interface, as it’s quite old and is not so friendly. Though at the price of zero, would you really mind it?? 🙂
[ Link ]9. FreeDigitalPhotos
Apart from downloading free royalty images from FreeDigitalPhotos, you can also download Powerpoint, Word , Educational projects, Photoshop projects and more for personal and commercial use. It also provides greeting cards but it’s not allowed to use for commercial use. Thus if you are looking for something more than just images then do head to FreeDigitalPhotos.
[ Link ]10. Photogen
Photogen also provides free images for personal and commercial use. Photogen provides you categories of images such as animals, cultures, nature, business etc. You can select the one suits your requirement. Photogen provides very relevant search and good quality images. It is simple to use and easy to search for free images.
[ Link ]11. Stock Photos for free:
This is another popular Website that let you download free stock photos for your personal or commercial use. You can create a free account and start downloading images right now. You can also mark images as favorite and download it later.
When you are not in the budget and need free images for your project, above mentioned free sites will work as a rescue. Make sure you read every site’s terms of usage to be clear about where you can use or where you can’t use these download images. Most of them don’t allow using downloaded images for the pornographic site or for the trademark.
This is another popular site where you can find 335 MILLION Premium Royalty-Free Stock Photos From The Foter Community. Though it requires attribution.
For further reading:
Do you prefer to use Royalty Free Stock Images on your blog, if yes, then do share with us which stock image website you prefer to use for downloading images?
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Thanks Harsh bro but I don’t have Pc to download images from this sites. Can you tell me Some mobile friendly sites
Hey Rakesh,
Try this:http://www.upicm.com
Pixabay and Pexels are my favourite stock images website.
Can we use screenshot images.is it violation from adsense???
Hey Rahul,
Yes, you can use screenshots.
As a new beginner, I have learned a lot from your article yes i do agree that we need to upload with good quality of picture for our article to make it more attractive… Thnx for the post.
Hey Viki,
Thanks for your kind words & let me know your experience with them.
bro can we use images with fully credit back to the owner of the image like adding img caption with source URL
@Hamza In most of the cases yes you can! Just don’t do that with your competitor website. 🙂
Prior knowing shoutmeloud I used google to find such images but never got convincing result.SML is just awesome
There are scores of websites providing high-resolution free photos which can be used for our blogs. Sites like Pixabay, Unsplash, Picbum, Jaymantri, New Old Stock, Splitshire, Kaboompics provide good quality photos which can be used without any fear of copyright violation.
what if i jst download image from any of the site and edit it in any pic editor then put it in my blog…will it gonna work?
You still run the risk of getting yourself entangled into some legal problems of sort. Before doing so, you should find out if the owner allows such usage after assigning a credit link or you can even seek his permission. By the way, there are a good number of sites like Pixabay, Unsplash, Picbum, Jaymantri, New Old Stock, Splitshire, which offer free high-resolution photos. Try them instead.
what if i jst download image from any site and edit it in any pic editor? will it still gonna effect my account?
I prefer pixabay.com but I’m not sure that credit’s are necessary or not….beacuse they write
(Certain Images or Videos may be subject to additional copyrights, property rights, trademarks etc. and may require the consent of a third party or the license of these rights.)
So plz tell me about this.
Truly, creating own graphical images is quite difficult job these days. While free stock images are useful for us. Thank you for sharing such a useful collection with us…
Great collection of images website. This will help us to use copyright free commercial images. Thanks for sharing valuable information.
Thank you Harsh Agrawal,
I generally visit this site and found your post always beneficial for me. Thanks for sharing such useful information.
hi harsh sir,
Thaks to this post
I search free stock image website
thankyou so much
Till now i was using flickr only but now I have so many options. Thanks harsh!
Harsh i agree with your points.. Images such show a lot of words, only one image can define a lot of thing.. For my experiance I see only those images which are present in any article bcoz it show me most of the things, those are use in blog via blogger…and image are most important in any blog bcoz it make your article atractive….!!!
Thankx for sharing this wounderful article with us….This article will give a inspiartion to all bloggers….!!!
Hey!
Harsh Sir..
All this site of this list is very good but i think you missed Photopin.
photopin is a very good site for stock image and i also used photopin Pixabay for my blog post image for very long time. i hope you will update this list very soon becoz you are a outstanding blogger…
thank you so much as I am looking few to choose from. I have two website that I am currently using at the moment, but seems there were some particular photos that were not in there, hopefully this one serve my list. thank you
Thank you Harsh for helping me out with the images. I was really confused with which site to go with for my article’s images as the quality of images matters a lot in the articles you post. Thank you again.
Hey Harsh,
You should add UnSplash.com to the list as well. They provide the highest quality images that you can use wherever and however you want.
I was always looking for that type of Post. As i was tired of Searching on Google Images. Definitely Give it a try. Plz Add more sites.
Thanks Harsh Agrawal