You don’t need a large marketing budget to get hold of professional-quality stock images. We’ve put together a collection of sites that offer thousands of premium images entirely free of charge.
1. Pexels
Pexels has currently has over 25,000 free photos, with around 3,000 new photos added every month. The images are handpicked from their contributors, meaning that the quality is consistently high. All photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, so you can use them for free without attribution or any other restrictions.
2. Flickr
The granddaddy of image sharing sites has been going strong since 2004 and claims to be host to 6 billion images. Although not all photos can be used for commercial purposes, you can run an advanced search for images released under the Creative Commons license. The quality varies (as there is no curation) but the amount of choice is huge.
3. Unsplash
Similar to Pexels, Unsplash has a selection of high-quality, artistic photos. In their own words “free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos.”
4. Pixabay
Pixabay has a selection of premium photos along with vector illustrations and videos. Once again the Creative Commons CC0 license means that you can download and use images however you like.