Your blog, presentation or website design requires awesome images and graphics to engage the online audience. Stock photography websites are where you look for images which best represent your ideas, but there is a bewildering array of options to choose from. So, here a look at some great stock photography websites to fulfill all your stock photography needs and more.
10 Great Free Stock Photography Websites
1. Unsplash
This is a great website for getting extremely high resolution beautiful stock photographs for all your online needs. Since Unsplash operates under the CC0, all photographs here are free for your use. You can share, link, use them commercially and you don’t necessarily need to credit the photographer or link a source.
You can browse through their collections, or just search the website for some great images to use. Or, you can subscribe to their newsletter which will give you 10 new photographs every 10 days, free of charge. You can check out the website here.
2. Foodiesfeed
Foodiesfeed is a great resource for finding natural and realistic images of food for your blog post or website. The photos are free for use, with the only condition being that they cannot be sold or resold forward. There is no requirement of crediting the author or the website with the image you use.
While they do have a payment for their premium photographs, the collection of free stock images is vast and quite useful. This is a great niche stock photo website to fulfill all your food photo cravings. You can check out the website here.
3. Thenounproject
This is a beautifully designed, quirky website to address a small but powerful need that we face while publishing online content. Sometimes, what you need is not a photograph, but an icon for your web design or just a placeholder to attract readership for your blog. Thenounproject offers hundreds of icons for everyday use.
The only catch here is that a free user must give credit to the creator while using the icon or design. The website has a huge archive of images about nearly everything you can imagine, so this is a small price to pay. You can check out the website here.
4. Deathtothestockphoto
Deathtothestockphoto is a great newsletter to subscribe to, if you have an insatiable appetite for stock photos. The website is not a searchable photo archive like most stock photography websites. The model here is getting free stock photos in your inbox monthly. The images you get are free for your use, with only the condition of not distributing them all over the place.
They also have a premium option which is a paid subscription to some of their most incredible images. They use part of the money to finance artistic projects all over the world, which will add to their archive as well. You can check out the website here.
5. Uifaces
This is a one stop shop for all the faces! Uifaces offers a unique collection of real people and real faces for use in your UI mockups, website testimonials or just a random photo with a face. They have two types of face photos available.
The “authorized” category is for faces which have been approved by their owners for use on live products. So you can go ahead and paste their mug all over the internet. The “everybody” category is their full complement of faces, which are only for use in mockups. They usually include the twitter handle of everyone who puts up their face, so you can directly reach out for permission as well. You can check out the website here.
6. Allthefreestock
This is one of the biggest repositories of stock photographs at your fingertips. You can access dozens of stock photography websites and many categories of stock photographs from this one portal. They even have helpful filters to sort out images approved for commercial use and other image privacy settings to help refine your search.
Allthefreestock offers a little more for your stock needs, with video, sound effects and website templates on offer as well. You can check out the website here.
7. Pexels
Pexels is another great aggregator of stock photographs from around the web. The act as a repository and pick great stock photos from other niche or smaller stock photo websites and pages. All photographs here are licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 license. This means that all these great images are free for your use, including commercial use and distribution with no need to attribute sources.
They currently claim to have over 6000 photos in their databases with 1500 more photos added every month. That’s a lot of stock photos! You can check out the website here.
8. Gratisography
This website looks like the kind of awesome Instagram feed we all wish for, but never get. Just like the name suggests, the photographer and artist Ryan McGuire offers amazing high resolution images for use by anyone, free of charge or restriction.
The website interface is elegant and quite easy to use, and it does have a cool instant search feature that will help you get what you want. The image archives are not huge, but every photograph is extremely high quality, so this is a place where you might just get the perfect photograph. You can check out the website here.
9. Newoldstock
Sometimes we all need that old-timey photo for a period piece or just because we thought of a wacky blog idea set in the 19th century. This is the place which you must turn to for your vintage photo requirement. You can check out the website here.
A drawback to this website is the absence of a search tool, which can make it a little tiring to sift through their archives. On the plus side, they offer themed photo packs for use, albeit at a cost.
10. Superfamous
Superfamous.com is more than just a stock photo website, though that is one of its most attractive features. It is like an online artist’s studio, with amazing design templates among its offerings. All the stock photos are maintained by a single artist, the man behind the website and idea.
The photos here are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means that the work can be used by anyone for anything free of charge. The catch being that the credit for the work would have to be given to the artist in your publication. You can check out the website here.
There are dozens of stock photography websites out there, but this list offers a few of the specialist websites you may not hear about as often. They provide great high quality content, images, designs and much more, all free of cost! Let us know your experience with these resources and other websites you feel should make this list.