As I was testing, I noticed that many stock photo websites have pivoted to AI-only photos, while others offer AI-generated pictures alongside standard stock photos. For the purposes of this article, I disqualified sites that offer only AI-generated images, but kept an eye out for those that offer a mix of both. And I gave bonus points to sites that incorporated AI tools—including image generation—in a useful way. If you’re a designer, content creator, or social media influencer, you know how important high-quality photos and visual resources are to your work. While paying for stock photography is an option, budgets are often limited.
The platform offers thousands of free images you can use to strengthen your content, including a large selection of business-oriented photos (e.g., retail, eCommerce, money, and products). The site serves up 28 different categories, several of which are broken down into subcategories to make it even easier to find the images you need. You’re not a photographer, but you also don’t want to use the same boring, corporate stock photo every other website uses. The good news is there are still a few stock photo sites out there that offer a wide variety of unique—and free—images for your creative projects. Stock libraries can often be a good solution, and while they had a reputation in the past for cheesy, low-rent images, that’s certainly not the case anymore. Whether you’re talking about small, medium or large stock photography sites, the quality is typically very high these days.
The 8 best free stock photo sites
You could also check out VistaCreate, another web-based graphic design tool that offers over a million stock photos, even on the free plan. Another massive stock library, Shutterstock offers a huge variety of images, vectors, videos, VFX, templates, 3D models and music tracks for use in your creative projects. Choose between a subscription or purchasing credit packs, and you can also use the Shutterstock Editor to resize, crop, modify, save, share and publish images. Pixabay is packed with well over a million public domain images – not only photos, but also illustrations, vector graphics, and even a handful of videos. Its selection of landscape photography is particularly strong, and the Editor’s Choice is well worth a look if you don’t have something specific in mind.
Burst is a free photo website created by Shopify, the leading e-commerce platform. Although Burst was created with Shopify users in mind, anyone can download and use the high-resolution photos. Unlike many of the other sites on this list, Unsplash focuses exclusively on photos (at least, for now). That means you won’t find videos, vectors, or any other type of resource. Vecteezy also stands out from other free photo websites in a way that’s often overlooked.
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And if you’re looking for free stock photos for Instagram or other social media sites, 123RF makes your search easy. If you’re planning to use stock photos in social media graphics or other visual projects, it can be helpful to use a source that pairs easily with basic graphic design tools. Pexels offers a wide variety of free photos and videos to use in your next project, and the website is fast and easy to use. Pixabay hosts more than 4.1 million photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and videos—all of which are free to use.
The selection of free vectors and videos is limited, but almost 70,000 photos can be downloaded for free. Since Burst was created by Shopify, you’ll find a higher concentration of photos suitable for use with e-commerce websites, although Burst offers a wide variety of free stock images. Whether you’re designing a website, social media image, brochure, poster, or just about anything else, photos and images are critical elements of the design. The images you use will either enhance your design or detract from it. Since images have such a massive impact on your overall design, it’s essential to use high-quality photos and graphics.
Adobe Stock – More than royalty-free
Most of the tools and templates here are premium designs, but none cost more than a couple of dollars. The quality of photography isn’t as consistently high as Unsplash, but if you can’t find the free stock best stock photography for designers photo you need there, Pixabay might be able to help. While there are also stock videos to choose from, it’s the photos here that make Vecteezy shine, both in the quality and the results that it gives you.
The photos on Flickr are known for containing rich metadata, including geolocation information, EXIF data, tags, and more. So if you want to find photos taken in France, select the World Map under the Explore dropdown, and click on one of the pink dots that pop up in that country. If you want to find images of golden retrievers, simply type the term into the search bar in the upper-right corner of the Flickr homepage, and thousands of results will come back. Plus, Flickr lets you search by trending photos and most recently added photos.
Work from Adobe Stock Artist Development Fund recipients
Vecteezy is a new entry to this guide, mainly due to how modern it offers the user in features and search results, alongside plenty of high-quality images to help your projects. Unsplash is a well-curated collection of beautiful photos donated by skilled photographers and has been used to create some incredible work. There are fewer images than you’ll find on Pixabay (see below), but the quality is more consistent. The site—which boasts more than ten billion images—brings together professional and amateur photographers from around the world. These pre-selected sizes can save you hours of cumulative time spent cropping and resizing images for social media. You can even apply a filter, add text, and remove the image’s background directly from the site before downloading it.
And while ethical and copyright-related issues are still up in the air around generative AI, some creators opt to use human-generated photos instead. Do you need a professional-looking photograph for your client or project and can’t afford anything bespoke? Reliable, high quality, and easy to search, these are all good places to find the perfect imagery for your design work. We’ve covered the leading sites in the industry, as well as the pros and cons of each. Whichever sites you choose, be sure to check the terms and license details for yourself to be sure that you’re complying with any requirements and restrictions.
Premium images
The site features contributors in a photographer-of-the-week challenge, which makes it a great site for finding photographers who are engaged with the platform and constantly uploading fresh content. If you need a professional-looking illustration—i.e., a hand-drawn image or a computer-generated graphic—you should begin your search here. Royalty-free illustrations can be tricky to find on many free image sites, but Pixabay has loads of them. Just click Images, select Illustrations, enter in your search terms, and that’s that. You can also use Pixabay to search for vector graphics, videos, music, and even sound effects. In addition to the free stock photos, Picjumbo also offers a few upgrades like the option to download all the free photos at once, as well as access to new premium photos each month.
In addition to the free resources, Vecteezy also offers a huge collection of photos, videos, and vectors that can be purchased with download credits or through a Pro subscription. Vecteezy Pro subscriptions allow for unlimited downloads, providing the best value of any stock photo website. There are also many niche stock photography sites out there (like Foodiesfeed, which specializes in food photography). So if you’re looking for a specific type of image, it’s worth seeing if there’s a niche site available.
Today, Unsplash offers more than 2 million photos from over 200,000 different photographers. 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. Anyone is welcome to upload photos to Pexels, and the site’s curators will pick out the best shots to populate its searchable collection of public domain images.
- Here, we’ll highlight the best free stock photo websites that will prove to be valuable resources for your work.
- I explored the site’s menus and conducted a number of searches to see what types of photos would come up.
- Do you need a professional-looking photograph for your client or project and can’t afford anything bespoke?