Best 12 websites to download free stock photos for commercial use
Whether you are doing a science project, a design mockup, a newspaper article, a project for an organization, making a presentation or simply want to print a beautiful photo on your bedroom wall, you might need a high quality pictures. Sometimes you can use Google to download a couple of images, but that might not always be possible, since those images may be protected by copyright law (and in most cases they are), meaning that it isn’t legal to use them without written permission from the author.
There are many professional stock photo websites, but they are not available for free. Each photo usually costs between $5 and $100 . If you only need to download one image, you can probably find resources for it, but what if you need 5 or even more photos? Why spend money on premium stock photos, when you can find beautiful free stock photos.
There are quite a lot of websites that offer premium free stock photos for commercial use (do whatever you want with them), but it will take up your time searching through all of those websites to get what you need. I will share a list of my favorite professional, high quality stock photos that can be used for commercial use and are totally free.
My favorite websites to download free stock photos for commercial use
1. Finda.photo
I really like this resource because besides the regular search bar, it offers handy extra search features by color, aspect ratio, saturation, height and width and other attributes within a collection of almost 4000 free stock photos.
2. Stokpic
If you are looking for a beautiful, emotional and sensational images, please don’t skip over this free stock photo website. The images are nicely structured under different categories and each week they are adding 5 new images to the stock.
3. Unsplash
The first free stock photo website that I have known for quite some time now. It has got a good search functionality and features many elaborate photos that will bring life to any project, desktop wallpaper or website design. Each day they are adding one new image to their collection.
4. Pexels.com
Another great website for you to download free stock photos. Many of these images are featured on other websites, but still, it is a place to try and search some additional photo inspiration.
5. Freenaturestock
Are you in need of a free wildlife photography? This is a free stock of nicely gathered nature shots. Not too many and not all in high definition, but it is worth to look here if you need a little bit of Mother Nature.
6. Stock-up
This resource is an aggregator of 21 different free stock photo websites offering a friendly interface, weekly updates and easy to download images.
7. Stocksnap
They say that they select nothing but the highest quality, highest resolution pictures and add them to the database on a daily basis. They curate the best stock photos from around the web and select photos from a number of daily submissions. In the end you get a great free stock photo website. It also features an option to filter the photos by popularity, downloads, views etc.
8. Kaboompics
This resource holds almost 1000 free stock images that in most cases are not featured in any other similar webistes. So if you are looking to find something fresh, give it a try.
9. Absfreepic
A very large stock photo site with nicely tagged and categorized high resolution images that can be filtered in seconds. Offering new photos every day.
10. Startupstockphotos
This site can’t compete with the number of images it has got, but the ones there are won’t be found elsewhere. To me it looks like many of these come from different startups.
11. Gratisography
Each photo has got this juicy and colorful energy in it. I love these beautiful photos that Ryan McGuire has shot and is releasing new ones on a weekly basis.
12. Splashbase
Splashbase stock offers more than 2760 photos and 240 videos with an easy to understand interface that allows you to download stock with one click of a button.
I must say that it is much better to use original photos that you can take yourself, get from a client, photographer or someone else, because then you can be sure that it won’t be used anywhere else as it is with stock photos, but if it is not possible or it is not relevant, then go for it – save money and download free stock photos! And one more thing to note, I usually prefer to use those websites that offer search options – it really saves a ton of time.
As you can see, you don’t need to spend a dime in order to acquire marvelous totally free stock photos, just know where, when and how to properly use them.
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