Looking for royalty-free images Stock? Now you can find free images and use it for social media, YouTube, and many self-produced content purposes (commercial). If you own a site or produce content on the internet, you’ll definitely going to need royalty-free images.
Sites like iStockphoto and Shutterstock both are the most well-known sites to get royalty-free images stock photos, but it comes with a hefty price which kind of defeats the purpose for small to medium content creators. Don’t worry, we have a lot more websites that you can try to get the best images for your content.
With more websites to try, you can find stock photos that are very difficult to find like specific situations or items shown in the pictures. Let’s get right into it, here are some sites to find royalty-free images.
21 Best Sites Royalty Free Images Stock
1. Google Advanced Image Search
You can use Google Advanced Image Search to help you finding royalty free images through Google’s search tools. As you already know, Google’s database is huge so there is a high chance you can find the picture you’re looking for. Google as a search engine also helps you to find royalty free images stock, but you have to search absolutely free and use it for personal or commercial purposes.
2. Superfamous
Superfamous is the home for the famous Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter. His photography is available under the condition of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license which allows you to use his work for your own purposes, this includes commercial use as long as the credit is given to Gorter.
3. New Old Stock
As the name suggests, New Old Stock has a big collection of vintage photos from the public archives. The content here is free of any known copyright restrictions. Use it to your heart’s content.
4. Depositphotos
Depositphotos offers everyone a sample of free images, vectors, editorial content, and footages. The database is updated every week. Feel free to sign up for an account to get free photos every week. Here you can find royalty free stock images without watermark for editing and commercial purposes.
5. PicJumbo
In PicJumbo there are many kinds of images you can find, the pictures can be used in many different situation and purposes. Every picture is free and you don’t need to register an account to use them, though you can subscribe to their newsletter to receive new free images. Also, PicJumbo has a database for premium photos, if you’re willing to pay for them.
6. Getty Images
Another very popular website to find royalty free images. There is a condition if you want to use the pictures here, you must use it for non-commercial websites only. You can embed the pictures on your website. Downloading them and uploading it to your website is against the rules, embed is the way to do it. We know that it can be intrusive, as embedded photos have its own share button, frame and branding.
7. Death to Stock
One of the best sites to find royalty free images we can find. Unlike most websites, Death to Stock doesn’t keep a gallery of images on their website, instead, it sends 20 new photos to you every month after you sign up for its newsletter. The photos are of high quality and if you haven’t already, you should subscribe now.
8. CreateHer Stock
Createher Stock has a big team that manually curated more than 200 images of women of color. Their pictures are free to use for personal use only. You can check out their license beforehand. You can also subscribe to their newsletter to receive new free images every month. High-resolution photos make large sizes. You can reduce the image resolution using the Image Resizer tool. It’s a tool that makes it easy for you to handle large resolution images when editing.
9. WOCinTech
WOCinTech is all about women of color in tech. created by Christina and Stephanie, the images here can be used for free as long as you give the credit with #WOCinTech Chat or wocintechchat.com. There are in total of 500 images that you can find here.
10. The Jopwell Collection
Created by Jopwell, The Jopwell Collection has several albums with hundreds of photos featuring people inside the Jopwell Community. All the photos are free to download and used as long as you give the credit to Jopwell. There is a background story of the website that you can read too.
11. Flickr
Flickr is very popular among editors, designers and here they get royalty free stock photos for free to help their work. And this is one of the most famous and best sites to find royalty free images. Many businesses all over the world have already used Flickr to store and get photos. Flickr is an image hosting platform where you can find, use, and modify images for commercial purposes. Simply, select Commercial use and mods allowed subcategory under the Any License filter to find your images. Remember that each image has its own license and you should always check before you use it.
12. Gratisography
Gratisography should be on our list of sites to find royalty free images. It has its own free photo license. The license lets you do anything you want with the photos. Their database isn’t very big, but the photos here have high quality and professional-looking.
13. Life of Pix
Life of Pix has a lot of free high-quality photos and partners with Adobe Stock for its paid stock photographs. It’s worth your time to check and see their photos.
14. Canva
Canva has become a very popular website recently. It’s an online graphic design tool that also has a lot of free stock photos. By using Canva you can quickly turn images into some specific uses for media creation, blog, etc. and everything is free.
15. Stocksnap.io
Stocksnap uses The Creative Commons CC0 license which allots its photos to be downloaded, edited, and used for both commercial and non-commercial use. The database here is quite huge.
16. Kaboompics
Kaboompics is free stock photos reliable for graphic design purposes, but kaboompics uses its own license, and it’s similar to Creative Commons Zero, with an exception that you can’t redistribute its photos. The good things about Kaboompics are that it allows you to search photos by its color and it provides a complementary palette of colors in the photos. Looking for the right photos is so easy.
17. Free Images
If the name doesn’t interest you then the database will. Free Images has over 300.000 free stock images under its own license. The license allows the photos to be used in a very broad way, and it also lists a few restricted use cases.
18. Pixabay
Among other sites to find royalty free images, we have Pixabay. All images here are licensed under Creative Commons Zero, which allows you to use the images even without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist but it’s always appreciated when the credit is given. Pixabay also provides a reminder to check that the photo doesn’t portray images that infringe any rights.
19. Pexels
Do you need the best free stock photos site? Pexels is our top recommendation for getting royalty free images for graphic design and editing purposes. Pexels has its own license that states in what way you can and can’t do with the images. You can use and modify all images here for free for both commercial and non-commercial use even without giving credit.
20. Burst
Burst is a free stock photo platform created by Shopify. There are many high-resolution photo collections that you can download for various purposes. You can also explore stock photography by category and all are free for commercial use. The images are both free and royalty-free. Burst also has a section for business ideas, complete with tips and high-resolution images to help your business getting started.
21. Unsplash
If you are looking for royalty free background images, you should visit Unsplash. Unsplash has its own license that lets you use all the images for free however you want. But you can use the images to create a competing website which makes sense. A lot of people and businesses are using Unsplash as their main source of getting royalty free images making this among other best sites to find royalty free images.
Which of the royalty free images list do you like the most? I hope you find one or several of the best sites to find free photos for graphic design purposes.