In a perfect world, we could all take amazing photos, edit them scrupulously, and somehow manage to have enough props and stylish flair to snap the exact image you need to illustrate your post.
In the real world, we have access to other talented people who do that instead!
I’ve lost count of the posts I’ve pinned, sent to Evernote, or emailed to myself that round up great places to find free images on the internet. To save myself that headache (and hopefully you too!) here they all are, finally, in one place. Pin it for yourself!
Tweet this: 27 Places to Find Free Images Online: @veggie_mama + @ProBlogger
Pexels
Pexels
from their site: All photos on Pexels are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the photos. The pictures are free for personal and even for commercial use. All without asking for permission or setting a link to the source. So thatattribution is not required. All in all the photos are completely free to be used for any legal purpose.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons has almost 25 million freely usable media files. You need to read their Reuse guide to check out the licensing requirements, though.
Getty Images
Getty Images has more than 50 million embeddable images – just hover over an image and click the </> icon to get the code to paste into your post.
Note: with Getty you can use these images IF you are non commercial. So if you’re making money from your blog – proceed with caution.
Public Domain Archive
Public Domain Archive
Public Domain Images are bloggers who have curated all the images in the public domain they’ve come across in one handy place. Both modern and vintage images to choose from.
Free Images
Free Images (previously stock.XCHNG) have stricter requirements with their licensing, so do check each image before use. Option to purchase other photos as well.
Open Photo
Open Photo has plenty of images, vectors, and even video to choose from.
New Old Stock
New Old Stock
New Old Stock is full of vintage photos from public archives, free of known copyright restrictions. You could scroll for hours!
Picography
As Picography says: Free high resolution photos. Use them however you like.
Creative Market
Creative Market is a paid service, with a weekly grab-bag of free images, fonts and other goodies to use on your blog.
Stokpic
Stokpic
Stokpic not only has beautiful images totally free to use for personal or commercial use, they will also email you a package of 10 every two weeks. Their image categories are listed right at the top so you can see at a glance if they have something you’re looking for.
Foodies Feed
Stockvault
A very easy search function lets you find exactly what you’re looking for straight away on Stockvault. You can read the permitted usage terms here.
Unsplash
Unsplash
A great selection of images, to which 10 new ones are added every 10 days. There isn’t any search function or categories list, which can make it hard to find something specific, but the current images are laid out in a grid format for you to view.
Photopin
Photopin has free photos for bloggers and creatives, which are accessed from the search bar on their home page.
A Prettier Web
A Prettier Web has beautiful (and quite girly) free images for bloggers and creatives.
Picjumbo
Picjumbo
Picjumbo has categories of free images on the left-hand side to help you find what you’re looking for. Everything from abstracts to weddings.
SplitShire
Click the menu box on the upper right-hand-side of SplitShire to find the categories, otherwise, scroll through the offerings.
Death to the Stock Photo
Death to the Stock Photo has a bundle of free images that get sent to subscribers each month, usually in a theme.
Gratisography
If you’re looking for something quirky and fun, you’ll find it at Gratisography.
Morguefile
To use some of the images at Morguefile, you’ll need to ask permission and link back to the creator, but they’re free and hi-res.
Dreamstime
An easy-to-use list of categories shows itself when you are on the “free images” section of the Dreamstime site.
Pixabay
Pixabay
Pixabay has tons of public domain vectors, drawings, and photos – all for free. A captcha is necessary prior to download, or you can sign up.
FreeFoto
FreeFoto has 132549 free images to use with attribution and linkback.
iStock
Part of Getty Images,iStock has free photos, illustrations, video, audio, and editorial files in weekly batches.
Boss Fight
Boss Fight has one mission: To be your final “Boss Fight” when it comes to finding completely free (do whatever you want) stock images, photos, and photography.
Flickr Creative Commons
Flickr Creative Commons is constantly updated with people all over the world sharing their photos for use. Do check each attribution licence, however, as some are stricter than others.
StockSnap
StockSnap also has royalty-free images with no attribution required.
And not technically photos, but Entypo has 411 pictograms for use on websites. Fun!
Where are your favourite places to get images? Are you a photographer yourself?
Stacey is the Managing Editor of ProBlogger.net: a writer, blogger, and full-time word nerd balancing it all with being a stay-at-home mum. She writes about all this and more at Veggie Mama. Chat with her on Twitter @veggie_mama or be entertained on Facebook.
Hey Stacy,
Wow I just felt like I hit the jack pot! I was looking for places where I can find good free images and I happened to run into this blog post. All I have to say is that the Universe responded well with this one!
Thanks for the share and I will bookmark this!
What a nice idea! It’s very helpful for me. I have try to following your great idea. Thanks for sharing with us.
This is a very useful list. You seem to have covered them all. Thanks… Have been looking for more options and this post has so many!!
I was selling my stock, but last weekend I made them all free. I have a collection of over 600+ images (taken by me), that are great for blogs! Hope some readers here will come have a look!
http://www.blogchickablog.com/shop
Oh wow, that’s amazing! I’ve just gone to check it out.
wow! awesome share and thank you for your list. my personal liking is pixel-peeper.com for high resolution image.
I’ll check it out, thanks!
Hey thanks for the list of free images. This will definitely help me for my photoshops and image editing. I have also saved this page for reference and quick guide.
I’m so glad to hear it’s been useful for you!
Wow – this is awesome. Thank you so much. Pixabay especially is a great find. My blogs are going to get more gorgeous from here on in :->
I really like Pexels and Stokpic – use them nearly everyday! So gorgeous!
Hi,
Also check out http://www.goodfreephotos.com for thousands of unique public domain photos, especially travel photos, appreciate it if you add it to your list. Thanks.
Thanks for the incredible list of free image sources. Glad to see Getty on the list so I can embed their images for free. Usually photo agencies charge an arm and a leg for pictures of celebrities. This list has a little something for bloggers looking for every kind of pic :-)
Currently I’m using the Google Image Search Filters to search for the images because at these photo websites I don’t get the exact type of photos for my blog posts that can be modified to look different and dedicated for the blog posts I’m going to publish.
Thanks for this resource list because I always care for the copyright infringement or say I always care for not getting those copyright claim emails.
Excellent!! I found a few more sites I hadn’t head about. I *love* Pixaby. And thanks for letting us know which sites are totally free with editable pics. Sometimes it is hard to find that info on the site AND it’s written in legal jargon. Can’t wait to find some awesome pictures!!
These are great sources of images, Stacy! From our survey, the biggest challenge for most bloggers is to have a source of free images and also making sure they don’t run into copyright issues. I’m putting together a free ebook with image resources and I have most of these, but not all. I’ll go check them out, thanks! :)
As a promotional video maker, I have to play with images. This post is very helpful. Thanks for sharing such a wonderful resources of free images.
This is great resource. I have already found many amazing photos.Thanks for sharing and putting it together.
I search my images always on https://plixs.com large collection and good search features.
a huge list, i hope the best i’ve ever found so far :)
Can I just take photos off of other blogs? They use these services to get copyright free images, so if I take that content straight from their blog, will it still be a copyright free image?
great free image resources. Thanks
Hi,
Thanks very much for this resource!
I do have a question though. As a new – and insanely terrible with images – blogger, how do we move from finding these images, to creating our own bespoke images?
Does that start veering into graphical design? Is there a simple way to go about this as a beginner?
I’m sorry, one question always leads to another haha!
Thanks again, I really appreciate this website and it’s writers and posts.