The Blog - Where Business Collides with Human Nature

One of the most common questions I get is:  "Where can I get free photos or royalty free stock photos for business advertising, marketing, etc.?" 

The answer is not so obvious since each business has its own unique need.  What is the quality and/uniqueness of the photograph needed? 

Is free your best option or would you pay $30 for an amazing one-of-a-kind photograph? 

With this balance in mind and to help entrepreneurs save time, here is my list of royalty free stock photos for business advertising websites. 

This list has grown far beyond 12 as many have introduced themselves to share their awesome photos and resources, many of which are free!

It includes free, low cost and even premium options.  

Here is the list:

(Watch for "Free Photos")

Everystockphoto.com - Free Photos

Everystockphoto.com says they are a search engine for free photos. These come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo's license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos.  Membership is free, without advertising, and allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos.

Free images for business or commercial use are available if you know where to look.  Everystockphoto.com search engine can save time.

Pexels.com - Free Photos

•  All photos on Pexels are free to use.
•  Attribution is not required. Giving credit to the photographer or Pexels is not necessary but always appreciated.
• You can modify the photos. Be creative and edit the photos as you like.

Start with Christina Morillo's photos on Pexels.com.

Stokpic.com - Free Photos

Ed Gregory has been a photographer for about 10 years and although working with clients is great, he likes to just get out and shoot.  www.stokpic.com is his little baby where he adds new hi-res photos daily and he is happy to share the photos for free.  As you review the website, you will see he makes an effort to describe the images as well.  Check it out, he is an entrepreneur on a mission.  Ed is very generous by offering free photography to use as you like.

AVOPIX - Free Photos

AVOPIX offers free stock photos & vectors. All images and videos on AVOPIX are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0. You may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty-free for anything you like, even in commercial applications. Attribution is not required.  

AVOPiX offers more than 19,000 free images and new images are added regularly. You can follow AVOPIX on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/avopix

Beyond the many free photos and vectors, you can sign up for a PRO account which gets you premium services. 

• No advertisement 
•  Much faster loading - Enjoy super fast instant downloads without waiting
• Bulk downloads (you can download up to 50 images at once)
• Premium images and freebies every month only for PRO's

If you are weary of stock photos, you will want to check out AVOPIX. There is plenty of unique inventory available.

Vecteezy - Free Photos

Vecteezy has millions of free stock photos (https://www.vecteezy.com/free-photos
) on our platform as well as free stock videos (https://www.vecteezy.com/free-videos. The photos and videos are from talented photographers all around the world and guaranteed for personal and commercial use.

Vecteezy is a consideration because of these standout benefits:

• Better filters for people, age, composition, etc. than other photo websites.
• Pay contributors. No other free photo sites are paying their contributors for free downloads.
• Require model releases so end users don't run into legal issues with the models.
• Offer legal indemnification. We're so confident in our protection that we're willing to pay out if a user runs into legal issues.
• Require contributors to verify their identities to eliminate fraud.
  
  

Burst (by Shopify) - Free Photos

Burst is a free stock photo site that is powered by Shopify. All the photos on the platform are offered under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which means you’re welcome to use the photos for any purpose. They built this site to empower designers, developers, bloggers and entrepreneurs to create stunning websites and marketing campaigns.

You can use these pictures for absolutely anything — hero images on your blog or online store, backgrounds for school projects, shots for social media campaigns, client work, and beyond. 

You are welcome to add text and filters, or otherwise edit the stock photos as you see fit. 

SplitShire - Free Photos

Delicious free stock photos for personal & commercial use.  Daniel introduces himself with:

"Hi, I’m Daniel Nanescu and I love photography so much that I give my shots away for free.  Yes it’s true, we Italians are highly generous people.  I am a Web Designer - Graphic and Photographer... The same as you are! I'm always looking for some  cool photos for my projects and, believe me, I know how hard it could be find them...overall if you don't wanna spend money.

Well Guys, there you are... I wanna share with you my photos for free!!! Do what you want with them, for personal and commercial use. Yes, everything free of charge, if you like my work offer me a coffe through donation to help me mainting this project."

IconFinder

Iconfinder provides high quality icons for webdesigners and developers in an easy and efficient way. The site launched in 2007 as the first search engine focused on icons.

The target audience is webdesigners and developers, but the icons are also used to style desktop or in presentations and reports. With millions on icons downloaded every month it is among the most popular icon sites.

There are options for non-commercial and commercial use.

Pixelmob

SIGNUP FOR FREE AND GET ORGANIZED! - Find, Sort And ‘Favorite’ Photos From Multiple Sources Across The Web. It allows you to search millions of photos from across the web and organise them into ‘Favorites’. Think of it a bit like Pinterest, but for finding and favoriting royalty-free images.

Sign up free here >

Scop.io

Scopio’s mission is to find the best rising content creators from every corner of the world, and get you images that inspire. They do all the heavy lifting in getting your photo packaged and ready to go, tagged, titled and ready to be found and used.  They are all real people, and do not have models in them.

No matter what your business is about, the world is moving towards more authentic storytelling. People are taking such beautiful and diverse photos in different places, settings, showing us things we never had access to before! Everyday, they are "awe" inspired and interested from the images they see captured by regular people and shared on social media. There are over 25 million business profiles using Instagram worldwide, and you are probably one of them. Or if you are a content creator, you are among the billions worldwide that finally have a platform to share their world and creativity.

With Scop.io, you can download diverse images to use in powerpoints, websites, social media, templates, ads and more.

It is for small businesses, individuals, social media managers, designers and agencies that are looking to humanize their storytelling with real, diverse, and fresh photos.

It's hard to go wrong with a resource like Scop.io. Prices is $29/month for unlimited images.  No games, hype or hidden agendas. I like this one. Start here >

Pond5 - Free Photos, Audio, Video

Download thousands of historic media files for your creative projects.
Completely free & made available by Pond5.

Whether you’re a filmmaker, musician, designer, student, or just a history buff, the Pond5 Public Domain Project is making copyright-free media available for you. You’ve got stories, and we’d love to help you tell them.  Start here >

Freeimages - Free Photos

Categories of huge gallery containing over 350.000 quality stock photos by more than 30.000 photographers! Need a wallpaper for your desktop or illustration for your blog? Need a pic for your commercial website design? Looking for inspiration?

Share your photos with fellow designers! freeimages is a friendly community of photography addicts who generously offer their works to those who need them free of charge. If you have some nice photos that you'd like to share with others, try it! Not only it feels great to share, you will also get a huge exposure for your work!

STOCK PHOTO SECRETS

Before you go too much farther, you will want to check out Stock Photo Secrets and their information about using free stock images. Stock Photo Secrets is a digital magazine dedicated to the stock photography industry. Since it is an online magazine, they don't have free images on the website but offer photo website ratings, advice and paid plans for images. 

IM Free - Free Photos

IM Free is a curated collection of free images for commercial use. Photograph collections include Business, People, Technology, Food & Drinks, Objects & Items, Ambient, and Occupations. In addition to high-quality photographs, there are free landing page templates and icons. IM Free is from IM-Creator, a solution for creating and publishing websites.

RAWPixel - Free Images

Rawpixel is the world leading creator of stock images, but they need one more thing: YOU. Their team of artists want to connect with you to share ideas, collaborate, and inspire each other to drive our craft forward. 

Stock photos aren’t cool. They get that. Take a look at how RawPixel is fixing it.  RAWPixel >

Freepic.com - Free Images 

Add this to the top of your list. Freepik is the leading search engine of free vector designs. Freepik offers users, high quality graphic designs: exclusive illustrations and graphic resources carefully selected by our design team in order to provide our users with great content that can be used in both personal and commercial projects.  

Freepic.com is a serious authority and well worth a look.

LibreShot.com - Free Images 

• Free images for commercial & personal use
• Libreshot offers free images for commercial use.
• Images are divided into categories but I recommend to use a search box.
• Looking for license free photos for your website, blog or anything else? Then you’ve come to the right place.
• All photos on LibreShot.com are licensed under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain.

Added July 2015. Martin Vorel offered his website and images to be available free. Another generous offer by a talented artist.

PIKWIZARD

PIKWIZARD has over 100,000 completely free images with over 20,000 exclusive to them. They continue to add new images to their library daily with an ultimate goal of acquiring more than 1 million images.

PIKWIZARD also offers many photos of people, which tend to be rare in free stock photo sites. If you check out the site, search for "office" or "meeting" and you will see the quality the pictures, all of which are free to use without attribution.

GoodFreePhotos.com - Free Photos

Not just a free photo website, they offer photography tutorials as well.  

A travel/photographer/webmaster that travels around the World taking scenic and landmark photos created this website. He also does a lot of photoshop and lightroom as well as other photo editing. All of his work is public domain.

It has over 6000 photo categorized mainly by location.My site specializes in photos of state parks, national parks, national landmarks, and historical sites.  Included are business, tech, animal, plant, and food photos.

All photos are free to use for any purpose. 

Do you need a specific photo?  E-mail them and they will try to get it.

If you prefer, you can catch up with them on Instagram here.

added 6-3-2016

Gratisography - Free Photos

FREE HIGH-RESOLUTION PICTURES YOU CAN USE ON YOUR PERSONAL AND COMMERCIAL PROJECTS.  DOWNLOAD THE HIGH-RESOLUTION VERSION. NEW AWESOME PICTURES ADDED WEEKLY! ALL PICTURES WERE CAPTURED BY RYAN MCGUIRE OF BELLS DESIGN AND FREE OF COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS.

The Pattern Library - Free Photos

 

A PROJECT BY TIM HOLMAN & CLAUDIO GUGLIERI

Unprofound.com

This collection of photos is for anyone to use in just about any way they'd like. You may NOT, however, redistribute these photos individually or en masse, as photos, to any other websites or offline buyers. The photos themselves are still the intellectual property of their respective owners and you are merely receiving permission to use them in your designs, your art, your personal and professional projects, as your desktop backgrounds.

I like how Jim thinks.  He is an entrepreneur with a purpose.  Do not consider adding photos to your project without considering unprofound.com.  Free images provided for commercial or personal use.
 

New Old Stock - Free Photos

New Old Stock features FREE vintage photos from the public archive, free of known copyright restrictions. It is an eclectic and interesting collection of historical images. New Old Stock is from visual and web designer Cole Townsend.

FocusFitness.com - Free Photos

High quality free fitness, weight loss, and food photos can be found at FocusFitness.com. These are public domain images, free for commercial use. No attribution required. 

British Library (via Flickr) - Free Photos

Recently the British Library put one million awesome images on the Internet that anybody can use free of charge. They did not invent the wheel but instead used Flickr to host the images.  
 

Fotosearch.com 

What is Fotosearch? Publitek, Inc., dba Fotosearch is a provider of royalty free and rights managed stock photography, illustrations, maps, video, and audio. We bring together many different stock agencies to provide "The World's stock photography at one website."™ The products on Fotosearch can be licensed and easily downloaded for use in your advertisements, promotional materials, websites, etc. 

Not my first choice due to pricing but if you are looking for unique content, fotosearch.com is a strong consideration.

KaboomPics - Free Photos

Great place to get breathtaking Free Pictures for business or personal projects / License Use Search Box, click #Tag under the photo or choose Category to see images what you looking for. Every day there are new pictures added. Enjoy!
  

Fotolia.com

Fotolia is the first worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images, allowing individuals and professionals to legally buy and share stock images and illustrations.

Fotolia offers the largest image bank of free and affordable royalty free photos and illustrations perfect for any medium, web or print.

Fotolia.com is now Adobe Stock.
 

Pixabay - Free Photos

Finding free images of high quality is a tedious task - due to copyright issues, attribution requirements, or simply the lack of quality. This inspired us to create Pixabay - a repository for stunning public domain pictures. Your source for free vectors, free drawings and free photos.

You can freely use any Pixabay image without attribution in digital and printed form, even for commercial applications.

morgueFile - Free Photos

Looking for high resolution stock photos for your illustration, comp or design needs? Search morgueFile for free reference images. Yes, they're all completely free. whether you're an illustrator, art director, instructor or looking to add a defining visual to a presentation. 

Deviantart.com

• Browse over 80 million pieces of art in 2,000 categories
• Upload unlimited artwork and receive feedback
• Actively participate in the largest art community in the world (over 8 million members)

Deviantart.com is more than art since it consists of over 8 million artists as members in its community.  Don't be shy, take a look around.  Seth Godin talks about having a purple cow for your business and it seems to me this website community of artists might have one for you.

123RF.com

6,191,366 Royalty Free Stock Photos

Find that perfect photo with our vast content of 6,191,366 images here. Our friendly group of professional account managers worldwide are always ready to serve you anytime, round-the-clock. 

Another option for you with either pay as you go or subscription.  Remember the value is in how well the photo(s) is able to send your message.  
 

Unsplash - Free Photos

Unsplash provides 10 new and free high-resolution photos every 10 days. There are approximately 350 photos in the archive. All photos are dedicated to the public domain, available for commercial purposes without asking permission. Unsplash is by the creative design firm Crew.

This is one of my favorite resources.
 

NASA ArtSpace - Free Photos

NASA ArtSpace offers source material across a variety of new media formats (still images, sounds, video, multimedia) - to invite and encourage aspiring artists to view and make use of these resources in creating their own space exploration artwork.  You will find links to royalty-free content that is available for use in your own artistic creations. 

StockVault.com - Free Photos

A free stock photo community where photographers & artists share their own photos and artwork with people from all over the world. They offer thousands of pictures and illustrations of people, animals, buildings and street photography, beautiful landscapes, plant & flower photos, objects from computers & electronics to food images and jewelry photos. They also have a large collection of free textures ranging from grunge, dirt, paint, rock, plastic, wood and liquid to metallic & rusty surfaces and backgrounds.  All of their stock photos & images are 100% free.

Dreamstime.com - Free Photos

At the time of this article, the first 25 images are free when you sign up.  Dreamstime also offers free photos every day. 

• 8,152,025 images
• 2,170,448 users
• 88,915 photographers
• 377,266 monthly images
• As low as $0.20/image or free!

At Dreamstime.com, you can find a large variety of Royalty-Free stock images. Thanks to the continual evolution and diversification of digital technologies, we are able to provide images of a very high quality at a completely convenient price. All the images are carefully scrutinized and selected, in order to make sure that only the best are included and that the range of subjects is extensive.

What Royalty-Free means is that you pay for the image only once and then you can use it as many times as you like, with just a few restrictions. In other words, there are no license fees except the initial fee and no other royalties to be paid except those included in the initial cost.

With Dreamstime.com you buy credits and download photos for as low as $1.25 or sign up for subscription and go much lower.   They accept credit card or PayPal.

Life of Pix - Free Photos

FREE HIGH-RESOLUTION PHOTOS, NO COPYRIGHTS RESTRICTIONS.  IMAGES FOR PERSONAL & COMMERCIAL USE. NEW PHOTOGRAPHIES ADDED WEEKLY!  ALL IMAGES ARE DONATED TO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.  HAND-MADE WITH LOVE BY  LEEROY ADVERTISING AGENCY IN MONTREAL & ITS NETWORK OF PHOTOGRAPHERS.

RGBStock - Free Photos

Absolutely free stock images - All images on RGBStock are free for personal and commercial use. You may use them in digital format on websites, blogs, multimedia presentations, broadcast film and video or in printed material such as magazines, books, brochures, flyers and text books. If you wish to use an image to print on items offered on sites like Cafe Press and Zazzle, to print them on any form of canvas or template for sale or re-distribution or for any purpose that is not specified in their Image License or Terms of Use you only need to contact the artist for written permission. Try it now! Sign up right away and start downloading! 

Google Creative Commons Image Search Tool:

While searching for FREE images for your business you can use Google.  To get this feature when you are searching go to the Advanced Image Search page then  under the usage rights section you will see a drop down with different types of license that you can search for.  

Flickr Creative Commons - Free Photos

Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.

Flickr shares about Creative Commons Briefly...

Attribution means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give you credit.

Noncommercial means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work - and derivative works based upon it - but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike means:
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

If you give credit for the work, you can use the photo FREE.  Seems to be a top of list choice.  The photos vary wildly in both quality and subject matter.  
 

Creative Commons Search - Free Photos

Find content you can share, use and remix. This is a direct approach to finding Creative Commons images.
 

iStockphoto.com

How iStockphoto works:  iStockphoto is the internet's original member-generated image and design community. Get easy, affordable inspiration with millions of safe, royalty-free photographs, vector illustrations, video footage, audio tracks and Flash files. Buy stock or sell stock — or both.

BlogPics.com - Free Photos

The purpose of this website is to provide you with free images to use in your blogs, websites, social media or projects to help you get greater engagement. The images on the site are all copyrighted by me and I give you permission to use the images.

My aim is to provide the most relevant images in the quickest and easiest way and with that in mind I will be adding ways to get other free images and giving advice on ways to use and alter images.  - Stuart Miles 

Added 1-18-2017 

ImageAfter.com - Free Photos

Image*After is a large online Free photo collection. You can download and use any image or texture from our site and use it in your own work, either personal or commercial.

Free images are again the topic.  If you are just getting started or doing tests, then free photos from ImageAfter will be to your liking. 

PicJumbo - Free Photos

My name is Viktor and I’m the creator of this site. I’m a webdesigner so I know every designer needs high quality photos in full resolution. So I decided to offer my own photos in full quality (mostly 3888 px in wide) to you for free.

You can use them for many different things. For webdesign, sliders, apps, backgrounds or templates for sell. You are not limited. One thing I would really appreciate is an attribution. It’s up to you, it is not necessary but greatly appreciated! It’s easy — when you share picjumbo to other people, I can keep making more and more photos.
 

FreeDigitalPhotos.net - Free Photos

Free Photos

Download royalty free photos and illustrations for websites, newspapers, magazines, video and TV productions, iPhone applications, PowerPoint presentations, forums, blogs and school work.

Royalty free photos

Download free photos and illustrations for corporate and personal use. Every image is free, with an option to buy high resolution versions for use in print or graphic design.
 

WPClipart

is a collection of free photos, images and artwork that is free of copyright concerns as well as safe from inappropriate images. There are free photos and free clips here that work great for commercial uses, book illustrations, office presentations, and some just for fun.

BudgetStockPhoto.com

Wikimedia.org

Free photos for the taking.  Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. The repository is created and maintained not by paid archivists, but by volunteers. The scope of Commons is set out on the project scope pages. 

The others I dabble, poke, and window shop a bit.  Who can say where the next Picasso comes from? 

If you have one that has given outstanding results, please share!

Updated  7-7-2021