Whether you’re designing or running a website, stock photos are a necessary component. While you can pay for stock photos, there are plenty of free options that have beautiful images in a nearly any category you can think of.
Be sure to avoid using photos that you find when you perform a Google Images search. These photos are not necessarily ones that you’re free to use however you wish.
If you’re looking for photos to use for a design and wish to avoid copyright disputes, you need to locate websites that explicitly define the copyright license of each image.
In this post, we’ve curated a massive list of websites that provides amazing free stock photos that you can download and use for your personal and commercial projects. We’ve also included information on licensing and attribution where available.
Death to Stock
Death to Stock delivers a photo pack of 10 photos within a specific category to your inbox each month. The site offers a variety of options to use for your mockups, blog posts, or social media.
All the images are edited and refined by their in-house team. If you have extra budget to spend, Death to Stock also offers a Premium membership for $15/month or $144/year.
Death to Stock uses their own license, which you can read here. You may use the photos in your personal and commercial projects without attribution.
Unsplash
Unsplash offers a large collection of high-resolution images, gifted by a generous community of photographers. It has easily become one the best sources for free stock photos. The service’s team combs through new submissions and features 10 high quality photos every 10 days.
All photos on Unsplash are free for commercial and noncommercial use without attribution. Unsplash uses their own license, which you can read here.
Gratisography
Gratisography offers a quirky collection of free high-resolution images. The website adds new stock photos weekly and they are completely free of copyright restrictions.
Freestocks
Freestocks provides a wide range of free high quality photos. The collection spans across several categories, such as people, nature, fashion, and more, so that you can easily browse through a section of your interest.
The site allows you to use photos for personal and commercial projects. All photos on Freestock do not require attribution (Creative Commons CC0 license).
MMT
MMT offers a collection of high resolution photos provided by Jeffrey Betts. The site adds new photos on a weekly basis, and you can use the images for commercial use.
The content spans many categories, such as nature, city scenes, workspaces, and macro photography. All photos on MMT are attribution-free (Creative Commons CC0 license).
Picjumbo
Picjumbo is a collection of free stock photos for your personal and commercial usage. The site adds new photos daily from a wide variety of categories such as business, technology, nature, and more.
The site also offers unique paid packages for bloggers, designers, and agencies (starting at $10/month). All photos on Picjumbo do not require attribution.
StockSnap
StockSnap has a large selection of beautiful stock photos. The site adds hundreds of high resolution images on a daily basis. It also tracks views and downloads so you can find the most popular photos available.
All photos on StockSnap are absolutely free to use, for any purpose whatsoever without attribution (Creative Commons CC0 license).
SkitterPhoto
SkitterPhoto is a free stock photo website launched in 2014 by amateur photographers. The site provides a large variety of images for personal or commercial use, searchable by keyword or category.
All photos on SkitterPhoto do not require attribution (Creative Commons CC0 license).
Negative Space
Negative Space provides 20 new stock photos every week. You can easily sort the photos by color, category, and copy space.
All photos on Negative Space are free of copyright restrictions. You’re free to use them however you wish, without attribution.
Burst
Burst is a free stock photo platform, powered by Shopify. The site’s image library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images, contributed by a global community of photographers.
Many of the images are themed around currently trending business niches. All photos are on Burst are free for commercial use with no attribution required (Creative Commons CC0 license).
Kaboompics
Kaboompics provides high quality stock photos in a variety of categories such as architecture, fashion, food, landscapes, and more. The site is one of the most popular source of free images for lifestyle, interior design and specialized bloggers.
All photos on Kaboompicks are free for personal and commercial use but cannot be sold or redistributed.
Picography
Picography contains beautiful free stock photos submitted by Dave Meier and other photographers. You can use any of the photos however and wherever you like.
All photos on Picography do not require attribution (Creative Commons CC0 license).
Little Visuals
Little Visuals’ owner, Nic, passed away, but his photos remain online in his memory.
All photos are free from copyright restrictions.
New Old Stock
New Old Stock contains free vintage stock photos from public archives, curated by Cole Townsend.
All photos on New Old Stock are free of known copyright restrictions. However, you’ll want to read up on the rights and usage before you use them for any type of commercial project.
FoodiesFeed
FoodiesFeed provides thousands of beautiful and authentic free food images, shared by food photographers from all around the world. It’s the perfect free stock photo website for food bloggers.
You can use the photos for personal and commercial projects without attribution (Creative Commons CC0 license).
Jay Mantri
Jay Mantri offers free stock photos in a variety of themes and categories.
All photos on Jay Mantri are attribution-free (Creative Commons CC0 license).
Life of Pix
Life of Pix is a resource offering free high-resolution photos with no copyright restrictions. The site adds new photos weekly and features photo galleries for categories such as city, people, urban, and more.
All of the images are available for personal and commercial use without attribution.
FreeImages
FreeImages offers thousands of pictures from a diverse set of categories.
You do not need to include a photo credit for commercial use, but if you are using content for editorial purposes, you must include the following credit adjacent to the content. Read the license for more information.
Public Domain Archive
Public Domain Archive releases free vintage and modern stock photos every week. Just as its name suggests, the site sources free images from the public domain.
All photos on the Public Domain Archive do not require attribution. You may use them however you please.
Pixabay
Pixabay provides a large collection of free high quality stock photos as well as art illustrations and vectors. The site is clean and intuitive, making it easy to navigate your way through its large repository.
All photos on Pixabay are under the Creative Commons CC0 license.
Superfamous Images
Superfamous Images is curated collection high-resolution images by Folkert Gorter and his peers. These photos are perfect for usage in website design.
All photos on SuperFamous are available under the conditions of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. You can use the photos for your own purposes if credit is provided.
Getrefe
Getrefe contains high quality photos by a series of photographers traveling through Europe. If you’re looking for landscape, work, and travel photos, then Getrefe is definitely the site for you.
You can use the images for personal and commercial projects without attribution.
Freerange
Freerange contains a collection of high quality photos from both in-house photographers and a growing community of external contributors. You can find photos through search in categories such as editorial and news, business, and more.
Most of the photos on Freerange are under Equalicense. You can use their photos for nearly any purpose without attribution, but you cannot sell, redistribute, or relicense them.
Pexels
All of the stock photos on Pexels are carefully handpicked from a variety of free image sources to ensure that you’re getting only the best of the best. The site has a number of photos where you can filter by popularity, discovery, and what other people are searching.
All photos on Pexels are free for personal and commercial use without attribution (Creative Commons CC0 license).
Fancy Crave
Fancy Crave has a curated list of free stock photos in numerous categories. The site handpicks two photos daily and offers them for free.
You can use the photos for personal and commercial use without attribution. However, you may not redistribute or sell the photos.
Startup Stock Photos
Startup Stock Photos offers free stock photos for startups, entrepreneurs, bloggers, designers, publishers, and more. While the name is specific to startups, there are plenty of options to use no matter what industry you’re operating within.
All photos on Startup Stock Photos do not require attribution (Creative Commons CC0 license).
SplitShire
SplitShire offers free stock photos for commercial use. The site has various categories such as still life, nature, technology, fashion, and automotive.
All photos on SplitShire are under the service’s own license. You may use the photos in your final product to sell. However, you cannot sell or redistribute the photo as it is.
ISO Republic
ISO Republic provides a large collection of free stock photos for creatives. The site hosts images in a number of areas such as food/drink, urban, textures, and people.
You can use the photos for personal or commercial projects. All photos are under the site’s own license and do not require attribution.
Rawpixel
Rawpixel provides high-quality free and premium creative resources for everyone. Although the site offers a large and varied collection of images, you may only download 5 photos per day (under the free tier).
Rawpixel uses their own license. You may use the photos in your personal and commercial projects without attribution.
Vecteezy
Vecteezy offers a curated collection of free photos, all for commercial use. However, free files have usage limitations, and you must attribute Vecteezy in your work.
Attribution and Licenses Explained
For all the sites on this list, the license is relatively easy to find. Typically, there’s a description of the license on the page or a link to a description.
Here are two license types you’re likely to find on these sites:
Creative Commons 0
Creative Commons 0 (CC0) means that you can use the photos in any way you’d like. You do not need to ask for permission.
Creative Commons with Attribution
Creative Commons with attribution means that you can use the photo in any way you want, but you must credit the creator of the photo.
Attribution is simple. If you include a photo on one of a web page, add text that cites the photographer (“Photo by Jane Smith”) and be sure to include a link to his or her site, if there’s one.
While we have provided license information where possible, be sure to check each website’s license page for specific details.
