Since I’m asked all the time where to go to find stock imagery—and specifically, free stock imagery—let me revisit the topic.
If You Have Money to Spend…
Shutterstock is my go-to resource for imagery, vector art and video footage. Their content is superb and their pricing model is ideal for me: Monthly or annual subscriptions that give you 25 royalty-free downloads per day. I used to also have a Thinkstock subscription which operates in a similar model. For a la carte imagery, iStock, Getty, Dreamstime, 123RF and Inmagine are good options.
FREE!
The fact is that you can find more and more quality imagery online that is not only free, but also legal to use. These are the top dogs:
- Morguefile
- Stock Exchange (350,000+ images)
- Every Stock Photo (searches 20M+ images)
- Wikimedia Commons (19M+ media files)
- Free Range Stock
- Stockvault (42,000 images)
Some more free and specialty sites to check out:
- Amazing Textures (1,600 textures)
- Bajstock
- Cepolina (20,000+ images)
- Creativity 103 (2,500 images)
- Designpacks
- Dreamstime Free Section
- Fontplay (10,000+ images)
- Fotolia Free Search Section
- Free Images (13,500 images)
- Free Media Goo
- Free Photos Bank
- FreeFoto (130,000+ images)
- Image After (28,000+ images/textures)
- Image Base
- Mayang (Textures) (4,350 textures)
- OpenPhoto
- Pixel Perfect Digital (7,500 images)
- Texture Warehouse
- Unprofound
- Woophy (1,000,000+ images)
- Gimp-Savy (27,000)
- Stock Free Images (900,000+ images)
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a licensing scheme encompassing a few different levels. Content creators can assign a desired level of license to their images, for example, allowing them to be used by others in certain situations. The most common situation you will find is a photographer who posts an image to Flickr and specifies that this image can be used by anyone with proper attribution. Some CC licenses prohibit commercial usage or manipulating the image, but in general, you will be able to use a CC image for your presentation without issue. You can find CC imagery many places, but I like:
Search Engines
For whatever reason, I find Bing’s image search engine superior to Google’s in terms of results. Plus, Bing allows you more search criteria including Creative Commons.
Vectors & Icons
Most of the major stock sites offer vector images and graphics, but here are two free or freemium sites to check out:
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One last source for photos. You. Take a photo yourself and leaving aside the issue of people in your photo, you can do pretty much anything you want with it. Such as use it at the top of your blog post on free stock imagery (like I did.)
I was "finally" go through old emails and found yours. Thank you for generating a list of photo resources–some I've heard of, others not. I spend a good portion of my day looking for images that effectively bolster the narrative and these websites will come in handy.
As always I find your blog to be helpful. It's concise layout makes the amount of time it takes me to digest content minimal.
Thanks.
Glad it was of help, Brian! – Nolan