If you have ever searched for a good stock photo for a blog,
site, poster, or anything, you know the struggle is real. The picture that catches your eye is never free. And by now, you have probably realized that we have to shell out an excellent amount to download a single photo.
Well, if you need high-quality stock photos on a regular basis, it is helpful to subscribe to one of these sites, like Shutterstock or Getty Images. But what if you simply need just a handful of images once or twice a year? Paying a whole year’s subscription fee, in that case, is definitely not worth it.
Luckily, there are a few free stock photo sites that offer excellent photos for absolutely no fee. They have enormous collections, and most times, you’ll find precisely what you are looking for.
In this blog, we have listed 7 of our favorite sites that we use for our own professional endeavors.
All of these sites have the Creative Commons CC0 license, which means that you can download the image and use it for personal or professional reasons without crediting anyone! That’s quite great, right?
Pixabay
Pixabay is a cult favorite and rightly so. Check out all the sites featuring the best site for free stock photos, and you’ll see Pixabay perched on the top always. This site offers over one million high-quality images for you to download and use without attribution.
What’s good about Pixabay is that its search category is quite advanced that most of its contemporaries. You can customize your search result by using various parameters and categories like media type, color, orientation, and size.
On top of that, if you’re feeling a bit too adventurous, try using AND, NOT, and OR operators to build some concrete search results. Sometimes, the resolution of images is not as high as sites like Pexel, but it gets the job done for most web and print needs.
Pexels
Pexels is yet another site that’s almost synonymous with free stock photos. The images available in Pexels are very high resolution, which means that you can use them in big spaces like giant prints and so on.
Many photos listed here are over 10 MB in size! Moreover, they also contain information about every single picture, like which camera was used to capture it and what software went into editing. Like Pixabay, Pexel’s search system is quite advanced too. You can search using parameters like popular searchers, new photos, newly uploaded images, and popular photos. All the images are well tagged, highly searchable, and easy to discover through the discovery pages.
Stocksnap
Stocksnap.io may not be as big as Pexels or Pixabay when it comes to the number of images they offer, but if there’s that one particular photo that you can’t find anywhere else, there’s a good chance that Stocksnap will help you out.
Although there are fewer images, the photos resolution is very high and is on par with Pexels. The search bar is also quite accommodating, with options like date, views, trending, downloads, and favorites. If you want to speed up the process, you can directly click on the category page and browse images that way. While Stocksnap also displays sponsored, priced images in results, you can notice them right away due to watermarks emblazoned over the images. If you’re a travel or food blogger, it’s definitely worth giving this site a shot.