23 of the Best Free Stock Photo Sites Every Writer Should Be Using
Many authors who have just started a blog or need graphics to market their books on social media often ask where they can find high-quality images to use on their posts. There are so many copyright laws and finding high-quality images to legally use can often be difficult. I hope that in our post, 23 of the Best Free Stock Photo Sites Every Writer Should Be Using, we can make it a little easier for you to find stunning images, graphics, and videos to use for all of your blogging and marketing needs.
Stock images are needed for so many different reasons as an author. If you have a blog attached to your website you will need beautiful high-quality images to include in your blog posts. Of course, you can always use your own photographs but if you are consistently writing content you may find it hard to always only use your own images. Perhaps you are writing about the location of where your novel takes place but you yourself have never been there. Or you have written a historical novel and in your blog you are talking about the period dress, or horse and carriages, and wish to include stock images.
Stock images can also be used in social media posts. You can put text overlays over your stock images to promote your upcoming book release or even just have images relevant to your book. You can use stock images and video to create a book trailer for your book. You can also use images when creating bookmarks, postcards, and other promotional materials.
23 of the Best Free Stock Photo Sites Every Writer Should Be Using
1. Pexels
To quickly find high-quality free stock photos to use in blog posts or for creating promo graphics, Pexels is always the first website I turn to. They have an easy-to-use search system and they have a wide variety of high-quality photographs and graphics. Pexels has a library with over 3.2 million free stock photos and videos. But what really impresses me about Pexels is the high quality of their image collection. All of Pexels photos and videos are free to use with no attribution required, although it is always nice for the photographer if you share a little credit their way. You can edit and adjust the photos and videos however you wish. If you would like to read more about their licensing you can check it out here: Click to read
Visit: Pexels
2. Pixabay
Pixabay has over 300,000 images and vector graphics that are free for personal and commercial use. No attributions are required. This website is full of high-quality photos and has a great selection of photos that would be excellent for any author who has a blog on their website. You are allowed to make any modifications to assets from Pixabay. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Pixabay
3. Unsplash
Unsplash has a beautiful collection of high-quality photos contributed by many different photographers. They have a smaller collection than Pixabay but the quality of their images is fantastic. Unsplash has an easy-to-use search tool that makes finding images a breeze. Another cool feature is that Unsplash has its own iOS app, to help you find stock images while working on your iPhone or iPad. You are not required to give credit to the photographer but Unsplash highly encourages that it is a nice gesture to leave credit with a backlink to the photographer's profile under the image you use on your blog post. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Unsplash
4. StockSnap
StockStnap is great for bloggers. They have beautiful images uploaded by many different photographers and everything is absolutely free. They are consistently adding hundreds of stunning images to their website. StockSnap has an easy-to-use search tool as well as many straightforward tag category search system to help you easily find the types of photos you need for your project. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: StockSnap
Adobe Stock has a Free collection of photos, videos, and vectors available for people. To access the images and videos you just have to create a free Adobe account to download them. All of the assets in the Adobe Stock Free Collection have the same criteria as the paid collection. The free stock images, graphics, and video all are downloaded with a commercial license and meet model and property release requirements so you do not have to stress about potentially being sued for using an image. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Adobe Stock Free Collection
6. Vecteezy
Vecteezy has a massive collection of beautiful free stock images. One of the really nice features of this website is its easy-to-use filter that lets you narrow down and refine your search. Vecteezy’s team manually reviews each photo submission for quality so you are sure to have only great photos while you search. Another great benefit of Vecteezy is that they have signed model and property releases for all of their free photos. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Vecteezy
Creative Commons is great for finding images that are free and legal to use. They have lots to choose from but the search tool is not as easy to use as other stock sites. I have had great luck in finding old historical photos to use in blogs and promotional posts of historical books. Creative Commons is a nonprofit whose overall goal is to make licensing and sharing creative works as simple as possible. This site is behind every Creative Commons license for every website offering CC0. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Creative Commons CC0
Everyone has probably seen or used Wikipedia but did you know that there is also Wikimedia?
Wikimedia Commons has over 23 million media assets. They have photos, drawings, videos, and tons of different types of media available. You can search by keywords or topics then filter it even more. This is a great site to check out. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Wikimedia
9. Reshot
Reshot has a huge collection of free stock images that are free to use commercially with no attribution required. This site was initially created by designers for designers. Great for marketers who were tired of tacky stock photos who wished for something a little more real and organic feeling. They also have many free SVG, PNG, and vector graphics as well as stock photography. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Reshot
10. Morguefile
Morguefile is not curated and thus does not have the same level of quality as stock image sites where each image submitted needs to be manually approved before being permitted to be on the site. But for bloggers looking to find pictures of everyday life, and people in an organic way that does not look like posed stock photography there may be great simple free images for you to discover. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Morguefile
11. PikWizard
One of the cool features of PikWizard is that they also have a design tool that lets you make simple edits to your stock photos like adding text before you download the images to your computer. PikWizard has a great collection of stock photos on a variety of subjects. They have a lot of organic natural feeling photos of people and lots of nature and cityscape images. There are two different photo licenses for images on PikWizard. There is the Free license and the CC0 license. Both licenses make it where you are welcome to use the images on your blog but if possible, especially on the images marked free, you might want to give a line of credit to the photographer on your blog as a gesture of thanks. You can read more on licenses here: Click to read
Visit: PikWizard
12. SplitShire
SplitShire is filled with beautiful content. They have many high-resolution images available for personal and commercial use. They have lots of categories to check out and you can also search for images based on keywords. You can read their licensing information here: Click to read
Visit: SplitShire
13. Gratisography
One of the really nice features of Gratisography is that its images feel very organic. Their photos feel less like traditional stock images. Many of the images on Gratisography have a fun quirky vibe. They boast to have great whimsical stock pictures, people photos, and urban photos. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Gratisography
Burst by Shopify is a great stock image site for bloggers. They have many images licensed under the CCO license then some others under Shopify’s own photo license: Click to read
But overall you are free to use these beautiful stock images any way you wish. Burst (by Shopify) has a great easy-to-use search tool where you can easily find different categories of images.
Visit: Burst (by Shopify)
15. Rawpixel
Rawpixel has an extremely varied collection of stock images, vectors, and PSD Mockups. They also have large amounts of public domain content available on their site. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Rawpixel
16. Libreshot
Libreshot was created by Martin Vorel for web designers, graphic designers, teachers, students, journalists, and bloggers to find beautiful images to use for their projects. All images can be used for commercial use or non-commercial (personal) use. Although this site has a small collection, this site is definitely worth checking out. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Libreshot
17. Negative Space
Negative Space is a great stock image site that aims to help amateur photographers share their work with the public. They frequently update their site with new photos and showcase the work of up-and-coming photographers. If you are looking for stock images of the London area, Negative Space is a fantastic free stock image site to search. Based out of the UK, they have a great selection of images from all over Europe. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Negative Space
18. Life of Pix
Life of Pix has a library of high-resolution photos with no copyright restrictions. They were created by LEEROY creative agency as a way of providing great copyright-free images to people for personal or commercial use. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Life of Pix
19. PicJumbo
PicJumbo is a small collection of high-quality free stock images. As of 2022, they have 1,123 free stock images available to download on their site. PicJumbo was initially created back in 2013 by Viktor Hanacek. Now the 26-year-old runs his own website filled with his own photographs that are now being used by millions of bloggers, marketers, and designers. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: PicJumbo
20. Rgbstock
Rgbstock has more than 100,000 stock photos available on its site. All images are 100% free to use in accordance with their terms of use: Click to Read
Joining to either contribute or download pictures is free. You just have to click the "register now" button.
Visit: Rgbstock
21. Kaboompics
Kaboompicks has a library of 24,385 beautiful high-quality images all produced by one photographer, Karolina. All photos can be used for commercial projects. There are definitely many quality images on this site that would be perfect for bloggers. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Kaboompics
Good Stock Photos is filled with gorgeous high-res images that are free to use anywhere anyway you wish. No credit is necessary. Good Stock Photos was created by Steven, an online marketer and designer, who knows firsthand the challenges involved with finding photos to use for projects. Steven created his website, Good Stock Photos, to help others quickly find images they can legally use on their blogs or marketing promo. You can read more about their image licensing here: Click to read
Visit: Good Stock Photos
23. Picspree
Picspree has many different contributors who upload their photos for the public to use. All images are free to use for personal or commercial use with no credit necessary. You can read up on their licenses here: Click to read
Picspree has an easy-to-use search tool and different categories to choose from.
Visit: Picspree
I hope that this list of free stock image sites helps you find great content for all of your blogging and marketing needs as an author.
If you have any questions or would like to leave a comment below, we would love to hear from you!
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Samantha Panzera is an adventurous travel blogger, graphic designer, and multi-media business entrepreneur who uses the experience she’s gained over the years to teach aspiring writers the skills they need to build an author platform and take their careers to the next level.
