Introduction
It is commonly acknowledged that an image is worth 1000 words. The age-old adage goes that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the modern world, we often find this to be true when it comes to the internet. A website or social media profile with no pictures is just not going to be as successful as one with high-quality visuals. Everybody like photos, but they can be expensive. You may be asking yourself: Where can I get royalty free images for free? How can I find high quality images for my projects? Fortunately, there are tons of websites where you can get high-quality images without paying. Here are some of my favorites:
Pixabay
Pixabay is a stock photo site with over 1 million royalty free images that can be downloaded and used for both personal and commercial use. The collection of images is not only vast, but it also covers a wide range of topics and styles. That makes Pixabay an excellent resource if you’re looking for any type of photography—from nature scenes to abstracts to people photos.
Pixabay has images in different sizes and resolutions, so you can find the one that works best for your project.
Unsplash
Unsplash is a website that provides high-resolution photos for personal and commercial use. According to available data, Unsplash has 306,663 contributing photographers and more than 4.2 billion visuals available for download.
The images are released under a creative commons license, which means you can download them without paying. You can use them for anything from product shots to blog graphics to social media posts—they’re perfect for any project! When visiting Unsplash, it is worth exploring their Collections, Topics, Trends, and the Unsplash Awards section.
Free Images
Free images is another website to explore if you need high-quality, searchable, and royalty-free stock photos. You can find images for just about any project here, from social media posts to website design backgrounds to PowerPoint slideshows.
You can search by keyword and choose from a wide selection of categories, including nature and animals, food & dining, and people & lifestyle. You will notice that Free Images has a series of categories. The first one is called “Free Photo Categories,” which hosts images you can download for free. The second one is called “Premium Collection Categories” and contents photos protected by a paywall. But don’t be intimidated. The pictures in the free categories will most likely satisfy your need.
Pexels
Pexels is another free stock photo website that offers users millions of high-quality images for use in their projects. There are no restrictions on how you can use the images, which means you’re free to do whatever with them (just don’t sell them). In addition, you can download any picture from Pexels for personal or commercial use without having to pay a fee or sign up for an account. However, signing up for an account will give you access to some features like saving your favorite images and creating personal collections so that they’re easily accessible from any device when needed!
MorgueFile
MorgueFile is a website that offers high-resolution, royalty-free stock images. It gives access to over 400,000 free stock photos for commercial use. Their “Free Stock Image Collections” include pictures regarding “Work from home,” “Holiday Celebration,” and “Summer Travel.” Morguefile also has a feature called Trending Photos that organizes pictures using hashtags like #person, #holiday, #nature, #sunset
Kaboompics
Kaboompics is another easy-to-use site that offers stock free images from various sources. However, Kaboompics offers just more than photos. You can also download color palettes related to any pictures. Photos are organized by photoshoots, each with a downloadable “Complementary colors palette” next to them. Additionally, images can be downloaded in three different sizes: original, medium, or custom.
StockSnap
StockSnap is another great website for searching and downloading free images. All images are made available under Creative Commons CC0 license. That means you can freely download, publish, revise, copy, alter, and any image (as-is or as you’ve altered it) in both personal and commercial contexts. The photos are divided into Categories. You can also explore Trending photos. The footer contains links to the “Popular Photo Searches” and some “Collections.”
You can also upload your own photos onto StockSnap, so they’re available for use by other users.
Gratisography
Gratisography is another great website that offers royalty-free HD stock photos and images for commercial and personal use. They define themselves as “Truly unique. Usually whimsy 😉 Always free.” The photos are divided into categories (animals, business, fashion, food, nature, objects, people, urban, and whimsical) and Collections (amusing animals, artsy architecture, funky food, goofy grownups, hijinks hands, mischievous men, virtual backgrounds, whimsical women).
FoodiesFeed
FoodiesFeed provides “highly visually appealing free food photos in high resolution .”The photos are organized by food-related tags (like pizza, dessert, coffee, etc.) FoodiesFeed is unique because it is food-centered. Similar to other sites on this list, all photos on this site are licensed under Creative Commons (CC) licenses which means they’re free to use almost anywhere—with some exceptions, of course!
PicJumbo
PicJumbo is another excellent free image website. It offers more than 4,000 images for download and is organized into relevant categories (abstract, nature, people, etc.). In addition to free images, PicJumbo also offers premium photos for purchase. Additionally, you can download all 4,000 free images in a zip file for a fee.
Freerange Stock
Freerange Stock offers a collection of high-quality images and illustrations you can download for free. Most images are distributed under Equalicense, “You can use images for nearly any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without attribution.” However, as they state in their license statement, some photos are distributed under Creative Commons CC0.
You can search and explore their collection as a guest; however, you must create a free account to download the pictures.
Life Of Pix
Life of Pix is another great website with a decent collection of free images. The site offers a variety of “Galleries” with different topics, such as nature, city, people, objects, and food. You can browse through the photos by category or search for specific keywords in their search box. You can search by keyword, color, and orientation. It is worth mentioning that Life Of Pix is related to Life Of Vids, which offers free stock videos.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many websites where you can find high-quality images for free. You can get high-quality pictures without paying for them from these websites. The best thing is that you can use these images without any restrictions and without watermarks. So, if you’d like to get some high-quality images for free, try one of these websites.
