Free Stock Images For Your Blog
Finding the right image to use on your blog can be a real challenge. You want to maintain a high quality professional look but you don’t have the resources to hire a photographer or pay royalty fees.
Fortunately, there are a number of sites that provide 100% royalty free images for commercial use, generally through a license known as Creative Commons. Thanks to the good people over at Shopify for doing the initial research on this. I’ve gone through their list, picked my favorites with a website designer’s eye, validated their current license requirements and published them here for you to open up your blogging creative landscape.
Note: it is a good idea to verify the license requirements on these websites and they can change over time. Also, the requirements vary from site-to-site. Some require attribution, for example. Some don’t. (It’s always a good practice to give credit to the photographer and site)
Our picks: websites that offer stock photography free for commercial use
Pixabay
Pixabay offers a vast library of free images, videos and music for creatives. It is simple to use, but also open-ended. That means that you can reuse and remix these images as you please. You can even use Pixabay material commercially without worrying about attribution or permission.
Pikwizard
The newest kid on the block is Pikwizard. This site has both free and premium images available. One thing that I like about this site is that it has a lot of images of people.
Burst by Shopify
Burst is a free stock photo platform created by the ecommerce giant, Shopify. They source images from a global community of photographers and they are available to everyone for almost any use. You can use them on your blog, for social media and other commercial uses. You can even use them on other ecommerce platforms.
Unsplash
Unsplash was born from the pain it’s creators had in finding great, usable imagery. And they knew they weren?t alone. So, they created Unsplash, and today?millions of creators from around the world have downloaded over 1 billion Unsplash images to create presentations, artwork, mockups, and more.
Life of Pix
Life of Pix has an amazing collection of high resolution images from beautiful landscapes to vibrant city scenes. The photographers who contribute to this site are truly talented. They also have a companion site you should check out, Life of Vids.
I hope these sites will give you some inspiration and some good fodder for your blog or other creative project. Happy creating!
