If you’re looking for the best stock photo sites, then you’ve come to the right place. Whilst working on your projects, you’ll no doubt come across situations where a stock photo will be just the ticket. If you don’t know where to find stock photos, then this can be really frustrating.
As the world of stock photos is vast and quite complicated, we’ve broken this list into 2 lists:
- Free stock photo sites.
- Paid stock photo sites.
We’ve listed the free stock photo sites first, as we’re assuming most readers are looking first for free photo resources. But if paid stock is what you’re looking for, then the sites in the second list will cater to your needs substantially.
Without getting into a lengthy discussion about the pros and cons of each, there’s certainly a place for both free stock photos and paid-for stock photos.
You need to decide whether you’re going to go for free stock or paid stock and this will depend largely on the type of project and the budget you have.
Stock photo sites offer an affordable way to buy quality images for personal and commercial use.
There are many benefits to using these sites including that they have a large selection of high-quality photos, pricing is usually very reasonable, and it’s easy to find exactly what you need using search tools on the site. No more searching forever for a special image you need!
BEST STOCK PHOTO SITES
What Are Stock Photo Sites?
Stock photo sites are a great place to find affordable, royalty-free images for your website or blog. You can find stock photos with many different looks for any purpose imaginable.
Whether you’re looking for a fuzzy, close-up shot of an apple or a landscape scene with mountains in the background, there’s sure to be something that will work.
Many stock photo sites have licensing agreements in place with their contributors and in the digital age, stock photography has become a popular form of creative expression.
So, without further ado, let’s get into the list of the best stock photo sites on the web.
The Best Free Stock Photo Sites
Let’s start off with the top free stock photo resources out there.
1. Pexels
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through our discover pages.
Currently Pexels cover over 40,000 free stock photos. And every month at least 3,000 new high resolution photos will be added.
All photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by their users or sourced from free image websites.
They make sure all published pictures are high-quality and licensed under CC0.
Pexels
Pexels is a free stock photo and video website and app that helps designers, bloggers, and everyone who is looking for visuals to find great photos and videos that can be downloaded and used for free.
2. Vecteezy
Explore royalty-free vectors, clipart graphics, icons, stock photos, stock videos, backgrounds, patterns, banners, and designs from artists around the world!
Vecteezy
It’s amazing what can be achieved within a web browser – The simplicity of it all is what makes this software great. ·
3. Gratisography
Free, use as you please, high-resolution stock photos for personal and commercial projects. This project was created by Ryan McGuire.
Gratisography
Gratisography is one free stock photo site that has figured out how to cut through the chatter. By focusing on unique, individualistic, and arresting.
4. Pixabay
Pixabay.com is an international website for sharing high-quality public domain photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and film footage. Pixabay offers over 1,188,454 free photos, illustrations, vectors, and videos.
Pixabay
What is PixaBay? Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images and videos. All contents are released under Creative Commons CC0, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist – even for commercial purposes.
5. Negative Space
Beautiful free images for personal and commercial use.
All business, food, people, and technology photos are free, high-resolution, and no attribution is required. CC0.
Negative Space
Negative space is the area between design elements. It’s another tool for designers to design for the user experience (UX). Remember that white space is not necessarily white; it’s just the name to indicate spaces where there are neither user interface (UI) elements nor specific content.
6. Little Visuals
Sign up to get 7 hi-res images zipped up in your inbox every 7 days. Use them any way you want.
BEST STOCK PHOTO SITES
Advantages of Using Stock Photo Sites
• High-quality free and paid images for all purposes.
• Easy to use search engine to find relevant visuals.
• Stock photos are used to enhance the aesthetic appeal of an item or idea.
• There’s a broad range of stock photo sites, meaning you can find what you need easily.
• Creative images can be a great way to liven up your blog posts and marketing campaigns.
• Stock photos are accessible, affordable, and easy to use with just one click of the mouse.
• No need to take time to create the image yourself.
• No more searching for that illusive image you really need but just can’t find anywhere!
Little Visuals
Little Video Monster is a cloud-based website that helps you to create dozens of stunning video ads, content, viral videos and start driving traffic in 1-click!
7. Death To Stock
“Death to Stock is a resource, belief system, and call to action for artists around the world who unite in their journeys to make their own way.
Our mission is to resource the creatives with tools they can use for their projects, teach them what we know, and consistently fuel them.
We believe that everyone can be an artist because being an artist is an approach to your craft rather than a title you acquire.
We pursue this mission because isolation, inequality, and scarce resources lead us to remove humanity from our art. “Stock” is as much a programmed mentality as it is a category of media.
Death to Stock is not concerned with quantity. Our focus is a member-based experience that shows up to push you into the future with fresh media, education, and direction.
Let’s make something together.”
Death to Stock
Death to Stock is an Artist Owned Co-op that provides you with the freshest authentic stock photos and videos; with unlimited downloads and new work added every month. Cheesy and overused stock photos have invaded our internet.
8. Visualhunt
High-quality free stock photos in one place. 354 Million Free Stock Photos.
Visualhunt
High quality, curated photos and image tools.
9. Picjumbo
Search and download beautiful free stock photos for personal and commercial use. Free image download of more than 1900+ free high-resolution pictures.
Picjumbo
Picjumbo is a free stock photography site that was created by Viktor Hanacek, a young designer and photographer.
10. Magdeleine
Hand picked free photos for your inspiration.
Free photo of the day on Magdeleine.co, a blog that features the best free high-quality stock photographies for your inspiration.
Magdeleine
Hand-picked free photos for your inspiration. We are a stock photography and video store.
10. Stokpic
Free Stock Photos For commercial Use.
Download Free Photos In High Resolution. Free photos for websites, free photos for bogs. Free High Quality Photos CC0.
Stokpic
Stokpic is an incredible source of Unlimited FREE hires stock images that you can do whatever you want with.
11. Freestocks.org
Free high quality images for your website and blog. Free stock photos for both personal and commercial use.
Freestocks.org
Free stock photos for both personal and commercial use. High quality images for your website and blog free of charge. No attribution required.
12. Kaboompics
Find the best free stock images. Download all images and use them in your projects.
Kaboompics
Kaboompics is the home of over 17,000 free stock images, most of which can be viewed and sorted by ‘Photoshoot’ or by individual tag.
13. Burst By Shopify
“Burst is a free stock photo platform that is powered by Shopify. Our image library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images that were shot by our global community of photographers.
We built Burst to provide designers, developers, bloggers and entrepreneurs with access to beautiful free stock photography. You can use our pictures for just about anything — your website, blog or online store, school projects, Instagram ads, facebook posts, desktop backgrounds, client work and more.
All our photos are free for commercial use with no attribution required; you can read more about this on our license page.”
Burst by Shopify
Burst is a free stock image library that is powered by Shopify. Download the perfect HD picture for your website or online store, no attribution required.
14. Startup Stock Photos
“Free photos for startups, bloggers, publishers, websites, designers, developers, creators, & everyone else.
Startup Stock Photos was started as an outlet for photos we were already taking on a regular basis. It’s grown to be much more than that. People and organization all over the world have used these photos to make some really awesome things. We’re happy to have helped.
What time we have outside of our work and projects we aim to spend finding and sharing the productive spaces of the world with other creators. We hope this project continues to be useful, and serves as a positive representation of the world of tech today.”
Startup Stock Photos
Startup Stock Photos are free startup, office, and tech stock photos ready for your next project. Used by millions. Make something awesome.
15. Jay Mantri
Free stock photos from Jay Mantri. All photos are free from copyright restrictions – no attribution required.
Jay Mantri
Jay Mantri is a smaller stock photography & video company operating the e-commerce site jaymantri.com.
16. Freerange
Free stock photography at freerangestock.com. High-resolution stock images and textures for free with photographer ad revenue sharing system.
Freerange
Free stock photography at freerangestock.com. Legally sourced, high-resolution stock images, illustrations and textures for commercial use.
17. Morguefile
Morguefile.com. Over 380000 high quality, high resolution photos. Free for commercial use. No attribution required.
Morguefile
Morguefile is an online photo site and social network. A morgue file is a place to keep post production materials for use of reference, an inactive job file.
18. Libreshot
“Unique stock photo site with free images for commercial use. CC0 license. Just search, download and use. No attribution required. Enjoy! All photos has guaranteed origin – all are taken by me. All pictures are licensed using CC0 so you can use them without attribution – But I’ll be very grateful if you will :-)”
LibreShot
LIBRESHOT Free Images. Welcome to LibreShot Free Stock Photo. I’m Martin and you can download my photos for free. Free for commercial use.
19. Good Free Photos
Free stock photos and creative commons (cc0) and public domain photos. All free for commercial use with no strings attached.
Good Free Photos
The best free photo editor software is often the simplest. With Paint.NET, this simplicity is key. It’s not only free but quick and easy to operate.
20. Fancycrave
Every day we handpick and giveaway two free authentic photos from real people. Each photo is licensed under CC0 and can be used commercially.
Igor Ovsyannykov started Fancycrave 3 years ago, completely from scratch.
It all started in February 2015 when he decided to start giving away 2 free photos from his travels around Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Laos, and Japan.
The goal was to help fellow designers, small businesses, students, bloggers, and online marketers who want to convey their message in style.
Things escalated quite a bit from there and Fancycrave grew in popularity. Today you can find our photos being used for social media, email newsletters, mockups, blog graphics, etc.
Fancycrave
At Fancycrave, we believe freelancing is the quickest way to escape the rat race and build a lifestyle around work you love.
21. Picography
Picography has been providing stunning images to millions of people for the past 3 years. It is now one of the top sources for gorgeous, high-resolution, free photos.
You can use any of our free stock photos however and wherever you like, with no attribution required. All photos are CC0 licensed. You can learn more about our terms here.
Picography
PICOGRAPHY is a free digital resource that helps you discover free high resolution stock photos.
22. Unsplash
Over 300,000 free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.
300,000+ photos for your next project. With a huge library of photos and thousands more being added each day, chances are we’ve got a photo for you.
Find inspiration in the new photos we hand-select every day or use our search to find and download exactly what you’re looking for.
Unsplash
Unsplash is a photo discovery platform for free to use, high-definition photos.
23. Refe
Refe is a marketplace of royalty-free, high-quality, natural looking photos of people interacting with technology. Here are free photos for your personal or commercial projects.
Refe
Reference management software, citation management software, or bibliographic management software is software for scholars and authors to use for recording and utilising bibliographic citations (references) as well as managing project references either as a company or an individual.
24. Stocksnap.io
Welcome to StockSnap!
We know how crucial finding precisely the right image can be to the success of your creative project.
Whether you’re building a business website, creating a print brochure, crafting a digital or magazine ad, or some other brilliant creative project, you know that a great image helps your content transcend “good” and become “great.” Compelling, eye-catching, attention-grabbing work on the web especially needs sharp, arresting visual images to succeed.
That, in essence, is why StockSnap exists.
We offer beautiful, high quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of – including commercial usage – for free. No tricks, no gimmicks, no fine print; just dazzling images for your creative projects.
StockSnap.io
StockSnap is built on a very simple premise: We promise our users an ever-expanding collection of the best, most beautiful stock images for free.
25. Skitterphoto
Skitterphoto has been around since 2014 and was founded by passionate amateur photographers from The Netherlands. Skitterphoto now offers photographers around the world the opportunity to show off their work and share their work worldwide through our renewed platform.
All photos on Skitterphoto are public domain using Creative Commons CC0
SkitterPhoto
Skitterphoto user reviews from verified software and service customers.
26. Splitshire
“I created SplitShire with the simple aim of giving life to photographs that would have gone into oblivion without any utility. In the course of almost ten years of photography I have accumulated many files, thousands, who were in the hard disk gathering dust. So I began to upload the first 100 high-resolution photos that you can freely download and use for personal an commercial purposes.
Now these photographs which were previously living in the darkest corners of the hard drive, live on websites like The Huffington Post, CNN, Books Covers, Magazines and thousands of websites/blogs.
I want to personally thank you for stopping by my site SplitShire, where I share all of my personal shots to the public for free. It might sound like I’m a little crazy, but anyone who has ever done any graphic design work, which is what I also do, knows it is so hard to find great pictures.
So far since the time of this writing we have had over 2.000,000 downloads, and over 6,000,000 page views. That just makes me feel great in so many ways.
I make it so easy to get my shots that any and everyone can use SplitShire, from designers, bloggers, website creators, social marketing gurus, companies.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaiFuyTbGLE
Splitshire
SplitShire stock image of a computer. SplitShire offers a ton of awesome free photos for you to use without commercial restrictions.
28. Life Of Pix
Free high-resolution photos, no copyrights restrictions for personal and commercial use. New photographies added weekly! All images are donated to the public domain. Warning: no mass distribution allowed. Distributors are allowed to repost a maximum of 10 images without our written Life of Pix consent. Hand-made with love by LEEROY Digital Agency in Montreal & its network of photographers.
Life of Pix
Life of Pix offers high-resolution photographs with no copyright restrictions. The photographs were contributed by Montreal-based Leeroy Advertising Agency and its network of photographers.
29. Foodiesfeed
Food photographers from all around the world share their photos under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license to help accomplish the ultimate goal of Foodiesfeed, to make the online space related to food more beautiful and eliminate all the ugly sterile stock photos that people still keep using.
Whether you’re a hobby or professional photographer, food blogger, passionate foodie or there are just some food photos hanging in your cloud drive that could be used by other modern creatives, join the community and help us with our mission.
FoodiesFeed
FoodiesFeed is a resource of free realistic food images in high resolution and free digital goods related to food.
30. Shotstash
Welcome to ShotStash! We’re a small independently managed free stock photo site. Our mission is to create and offer for free a highly curated collection of beautiful stock images that you can use both personally and commercially.
Whether you’re building a brand new website for your business or creating a blog about your personal life, you’re going to need images.
The right image is more than an accent. It’s no longer optional. These days, website and social users expect to see great photographs that reinforce your message and evoke just the right emotional response.
That’s the power of a fabulous photograph, and that’s why we’re here: to help you find just the right image to put the finishing touch on all of your creative projects.
ShotStash
SHOTSTASH is a free digital resource that helps you download royalty free stock photos and images.
31. Hubspot Free Stock Photos
We have four collections of stock photos you can download here:
You can preview these collections below. And if you’re stuck thinking of ways you can use these images in your marketing campaigns, scroll down for seven ways you can use stock photos to give your content some pizazz.
HubSpot Free Stock Photos
HubSpot’s Free Stock Photo Downloads have no royalties, no fees, and free to be used for any purposes.
32. MMT Stock
“Moment (MMT) provides free CC0 photography for personal and commercial use on websites, projects, themes, apps, and more.
I launched MMT in 2014 to share my love of photography with the world. Over the years I’ve taken countless photos and wanted to post some of those photos to use for free and give back to the online community.
The content spans many categories, including nature, city scenes, workspaces, and macro photography. These photos can be freely downloaded, used, and redistributed for both personal and commercial purposes.”
MMT Stock
MMT Account-Business is an MS Excel based software on Accounting, Sales, Purchases, Inventory and Manufacturing operations.
33. Flickr
Everyone knows Flickr. Flickr (pronounced “flicker”) is an image hosting service and video hosting service. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and is currently owned by SmugMug.
In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs and an online community, the service is widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.
Flickr
Flickr provides a desktop client for Mac OS X and Windows that allows users to upload photos without using the web interface.
34. Epicantus
“As Visual & UX designer and Lean Startup coach I create a lot of landing pages and prototypes to collect feedback and test various business ideas, so I know how important it is to make things FAST yet still beautiful (yes, we all believe in low fidelity prototypes but people still prefer beautiful things :)).
Finding images that carry the right message usually takes hours, therefore every photo I make in my spare time will appear here for you. All of them are free for personal & commercial use.”
Epicantus
A software developer makes a tool to calculate compound interest because he needs to answer his financial question.
35. ISO Republic
ISO Republic is an independent website that provides CC0 stock photos for creative professionals. All images are free for personal and commercial use.
ISO Republic
ISO Republic offers over 7000 of the best high-resolution stock images & videos, all free for personal and commercial use.
36. Eyeem
Born in Berlin, Raised All over the World
In 2010, our four co-founders came together to host one of the first mobile photography exhibitions out of a Berlin subway station. Rooted in a real love of photography and desire to empower creators, what started (quite literally) as an underground art movement has since grown into the world’s most engaged creative community – and a definitive visual platform for today’s content demands.
37. Styledstock
“You are allowed to use our images for any commercial or non-commercial purposes. However, the image copyright is still the property of its author.
You are free to adapt and use them for commercial purposes without attributing the original author or source. Although not required, a link back to Styledstock.co is appreciated.”
StyledStock
Styled Stock Society takes away the guesswork when you are looking for images for your website and social media platforms.
38. New Old Stock
Vintage photos from the public archives. Free of known copyright restrictions. Recapturing History.
Best Paid Stock Photo Sites
The following are the top paid stock photo sites. The charges vary and some of these have free categories included in their catalogues.
New Old Stock
New old stock (NOS), or old stock for short, refers to aged stock of merchandise that was never sold to a customer and still new in original packaging.
1. Shutterstock
Shutterstock is a leading global technology company offering a creative platform for high-quality assets, tools and services.
The company’s portfolio includes Bigstock, a value-oriented stock media agency; Shutterstock Custom, a custom content creation platform; Offset, a high-end image collection; PremiumBeat, a curated royalty-free music library; and Rex Features, a premier source of editorial images for the world’s media.
Shutterstock
Shutterstock is a provider of digital imagery licensing, operating with over 50 Million Stock Photos, Vectors, Videos, and Music Tracks.
2. Depositphotos
Depositphotos — is a commercial platform that brings authors of high-quality licensed stock photos, graphics, vectors and videos together with appreciative buyers. Thanks to the efforts of talented professionals from all over the globe and our world-class technical solutions, we were able to build a perfect place to marry business with creativity.
Depositphotos
Depositphotos has a huge library of 200+ million high-quality assets (photos, videos, illustrations) that help you create better content.
3. Fotolia
Discover more than 35 million cheap royalty-free images, vectors and videos. Fotolia is the image bank for all your publishing and marketing projects!
Fotolia
Fotolia is now Adobe Stock. Get all the best from Fotolia and much more.
4. Photocase
“We believe in real-life, authentic, aesthetic, fresh and fair stock photos. That’s why we’ve been offering unconventional stock photos on various themes since 2001. We inspire you through our search engine, and make it super easy to buy photos, and we’re always there to answer questions. Working from a pool of curated photos means you’ll have more time to be creative.”
Photocase
Photocase is a German stock photo agency specializing in unconventional, artistic, authentic stock photos with a clear Berlin-style vibe.
5. Istockphoto
Founded in 2000, iStock created the crowd-sourced stock industry and became the original source for user-generated stock photos, vectors and illustrations, and video clips.
iStockphoto
iStock is an online royalty free, international micro stock photography provider based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The firm offers millions of photos, illustrations, clip art, videos and audio tracks. Artists, designers and photographers worldwide contribute their work to iStock collections in return for royalties.
6. Adobe Stock
Find the perfect image to enhance your next creative project. Right inside your Adobe Creative Cloud apps. Preview watermarked images inside your designs first. Then license, access and manage them directly within
Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock is a provider of ready-to-use photos, illustrations, videos, templates and 3D assets for creative projects.
7. 123RF
As a 100% bootstrapped company since 2005, we have grown to be one of the world’s largest digital stock agency with an evenly distributed global footprint. 123RF has helped a wide clientele of individuals and businesses tell their stories using creative imagery, sounds and motion contributed by talents from around the world. Moving forward, we are ready to impact the creative industry in a big way as a global player that enables creative solutions through constant innovation, new products and services. So keep an eye out for us!
8. Dreamstime
Dreamstime is one of the world leaders in stock photography and a reliable supplier of high quality digital images at affordable prices. Online since 2000 as a Royalty-Free stock photography website, Dreamstime has evolved into a powerful and active community-based site.
The exquisite stock image gallery you can browse today has been uploaded by photographers from all over the world, shot on film or digital. To ensure you receive the best content, all images are reviewed and approved by experienced editors. The Dreamstime database is renewed with thousands of fresh images and titles on a daily basis.
Dreamstime
Dreamstime is a platform for people to discover and use professional stock photos, videos, audio and illustration. It’s currently one of the leading agencies
9. Thinkstock
Download royalty-free images, high-resolution stock photos, vector art and illustrations from Thinkstock UK. High-quality, affordable stock photography subscriptions.
Thinkstock
Thinkstock is the only subscription that combines photos, vectors and illustrations selected from Getty Images, iStockphoto, Jupiterimages.
10. Getty Images
Find high resolution royalty-free images, editorial stock photos, vector art, video footage clips and stock music licensing at the richest image search photo library online.
Getty Stock Images
Getty Images Holdings, Inc. (stylised as gettyimages) is an American visual media company and is a supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video and music for business and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets.
The Best Stock Photo Sites – Summary
We really hope this list of the best stock photo sites has been helpful to you. As ever, when it comes to free stock photos vs. paid stock photos, the choice is yours and really depends on your budget and the type of project you’re engaged in.
One thing to remember is that it’s a common misconception that ‘royalty free’ means actually free. Royalty free actually just means the right to use copyright material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each photo used.
So when a stock photo site is talking about ‘royalty free,’ understand that they’re referring to that and not saying that their entire collection is free. If you’re looking for actually physically free stock photos, then consult our first list.
And please remember to always check the licenses on these sites. Sometimes you will need to give attribution for using the image.
What did we miss? If we missed out your favorite stock photo resource, let us know in the comments below.
Matt Crawford
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Great list of stock photo sites, thanks!
Absolutely, thanks!
I found this site and thought it was interesting. Thanks for the work on assembling this list of stock photo sites.
Thanks, Ken.