Adobe Stock is a huge library of stock photos, illustrations, graphics, icons, video clips, audio clips, templates and more, available to license and use in your creative projects royalty-free. Some dodgy sites featuring “free” stock photos don’t always have permission to share them, putting you in danger of legal action for using these assets, even if you had the best intentions. So the safest bet is to purchase stock images from a reputable stock library instead. And even then, you always need to read the fine print on licensing and be sure these images will be okay to use now and in future.
Click Images next to the search bar to look for images by type, or you can search more granularly by becoming familiar with Pixabay’s advanced search options. Pixabay lets you search by photographer, orientation (i.e., landscape or portrait), size, and even color. The site also features an Editor’s Choice curation section, which highlights the best images chosen by the Pixabay team. Click the Explore dropdown menu in the upper-right corner of the site to see their selections.
Best for people
As with all the stock photography sites here, it’s not necessary to credit the photographer, but Unsplash notes that it’s nice to add a simple credit with a link back to their profile as a courtesy. The photos are consistently high quality, and artists are paid for their contributions. There’s an excellent selection of filters that you can use to find exactly the right stock photo, and you can even upload an existing image to find similar pictures.
Contributors are required to submit signed model releases and property releases if the photo features a recognizable person or private property. There are some excellent resources, and there are also some lower-quality images and videos. All of the creative content at Pexels has been submitted by a large and growing team of contributors. We’ve ranked our favorite sites for free photos based on criteria like quality, selection, license terms, ease of use, and other factors. If you want to get creative without leaving your browser, PikWizard provides links to an online photo editor.
Best for beautiful photos
As I was testing, I was also impressed with the in-depth and intuitive search features. You can order your search results by popular, new, or “curated” for you. You can also narrow down the content type, filter by price or file type, and even choose to exclude (or isolate for) AI-generated images. The thing I appreciate about Flickr is that it places artists front and center. When you navigate to Flickr’s homepage, you’re invited to join the community, and you can start searching not only by image keyword, but by people or group. Click into any contributor’s profile to see a “Photostream,” or a feed of their latest and most popular images.
Creating an account comes with a few perks, most importantly, the ability to view your download history. The creative resources are submitted by thousands of contributors from around the world, and each submission is manually reviewed by an experienced content reviewer. With many stock users creating content for businesses, being able to secure commercial and non-commercial rights is critical. And 123RF also comes with plenty of additional paid features, including AI image generation, AI copywriting, premium audio and video, and an extensive font collection. Marc has been featured in publications like Forbes, Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, and MSN for various business ventures, including a portfolio of successful photography websites.
Curated collections of mixed assets
Flickr is a great way to discover talented photographers, learn more about the field, and refine your own artistic eye. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t have as much variety as other stock photo sites—and not all of the photos are free for commercial use. The site creator advises commercial users to check with the originating institution’s rights statement through the provided link to the original Flickr posting of each photo. Founded in Munich in 2003 as a threesome with seven photographers on board, WestEnd61 now has 1,000 photographers supplying creatives with superior-quality images.
Freepik makes it quick and easy to find an image (or other design resource) fitting your exact parameters. Many of the stock photo sites I tested now offer AI-generated images, either alongside human-generated photos or instead of them. I found 123RF to be the most useful option because, while it does offer AI-generated stock images, you can choose to filter those results out. This feature makes your image search much easier since both types of content are gathered in one place for you—but you don’t have to wonder which is which.
Explore 200M+ assets in other collections – available with subscriptions or credit packs
Currently, Burst offers only photos, which means you won’t find videos, vectors, or other resources here. As Unsplash has become increasingly popular over the past few years, they’ve also developed apps or collaborated with others, so Unsplash can be integrated with some of your favorite platforms. For example, they offer a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to find Unsplash photos directly from the WordPress dashboard.
For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. It describes itself as “an art-forward, royalty-free stock photo + video agency that makes discovering unique, beautifully authentic imagery effortless.” Royalty-free licensing starts at $15. These stock photo libraries all have good reputations, a range of quality images, and useful search tools to find what you’re looking for faster. The downside is, you’ll need to create an account since you can’t download from this stock photo site unless you’re logged in. Negative Space is based in the UK, so much of the photography features British scenes.
There are also great vector images in high-resolution sizes, which looked great on our 4K monitor in testing. There’s also the helpful addition of a ‘free’ label to make sure which images you can download right away. Why can’t you just scour the web for an image you like and publish it? Because creators own the rights to their images, and if you publish one of them without their approval, you may be guilty of copyright infringement. In a worst-case scenario, that could land you a $150,000 fine for each violation, and possibly even jail time. The site is easy to navigate, and if you’re looking for inspiration, you can explore the Topics tab to find curated, themed design resources to get the creative juices flowing.
Back in October 2020, Adobe made over 70,000 stock photos, videos, illustrations and templates available free for personal, business and creative use. Its aim, according to a blog post, is to “make the means to create best stock photography for designers accessible images to all”. We’ve collected our pick of the best free stock photo sites to help you find the pictures you need. Burst is a free stock photo site powered by leading eCommerce platform Shopify.
Adobe Stock Free Collection
Finding the best free stock photos may seem impossible with everybody charging for every social media post and content these days. Adobe Stock is one of the largest and most popular stock photo marketplaces. It’s another extremely popular site that offers a huge collection of free stock photos that can be used for personal or commercial purposes. Vecteezy earns the #1 spot on our list of free photo websites thanks to the combination of quality, selection, and safe use.
- And if you’re a budding photographer yourself, you can even click Camera Finder under the Explore dropdown to see the most popular cameras currently being used in the Flickr community.
- Conveniently, you can take a photo from PikWizard straight to the DesignWizard editor.
- There’s an excellent selection of filters that you can use to find exactly the right stock photo, and you can even upload an existing image to find similar pictures.
- And I gave bonus points to sites that incorporated AI tools—including image generation—in a useful way.