8 Places You Can Find FREE Stock Photos

One of the biggest struggles for anyone who works on the web and creates content, is finding photos that help to enhance and support what you’ve created. 

As content creators, it can be very challenging to find great photos that capture your message and enhance your content. Whether it’s a post on instagram or something for the header of a blog, these photos can help draw in your audience and automatically lend themselves to connecting with your message.

Spend any amount of time searching for photos online, and you’ll quickly realize that there is a ton of content out there if you’ve got deep pockets, but the best places to find free content are often buried below the stack of paid photo sites that come up when searching for images. 

If you’re still looking for the right photo and need it for free, keep reading. The sites below have a ton of free images, vectors and other graphics to suit almost anything you can imagine. Take the time to search each site and find which ones work best for you and your content. Happy Hunting!

8 Places You Can Find FREE Stock Photos:

1 // Unsplash

Unsplash is probably our favorite site for stock photography. The selection is HUGE and there are always tons of options. Unsplash does not require any sign-up or membership to use their images, and when downloading any photos, they share the creator’s information to help you credit them and their work. Unsplash does have some photos that considered “premium content” that you have to pay for, but the bulk of what you will find is free and can be accessed without any membership or sharing of your information.

2 // Pixabay

Pixabay is another great site for finding a wide range of stock photography. Pixabay also has a large selection of photos spanning a wide variety of topics and subjects. One main difference of Pixabay compared to  Unsplash, is Pixabay does require you to join their community. It’s free to join, you just need to share your email address and create a user ID and password. Pixabay also has videos, illustrations and vectors if you’re looking for those as well. There really is something for everyone here, with over 2.6 million pieces of content at your fingertips.

3 // Canva

Canva is an amazing website for doing graphic design and building content for your site or social media. Canva has a large amount of stock photography, graphics, and short videos that you can use to create the content you’re imagining. If you’re specifically a user of social media, Canva is often the go-to program for content creation for some of these platforms. Canva will require you to set up a free account to use anything you find, but it’s well worth sharing a little info for. 

4 // Burst

Burst is a fantastic site for finding free stock photography, and is owned and run by Shopify. One of the great things about Burst is their vast array of collections for whatever photos you could possibly want. The photos here are all free, and they give you the option to join their community if you’d like, but it’s not required. Every image we’ve seen there is high quality and personally, I love their “around the world” section, as it separates out photos from different countries that you can use. If I can’t find something on Unsplash, Burst is usually my next choice.

5 // New Old Stock

If Vintange is your vibe, New Old Stock is definitely a site you need to check out. The selection isn’t as large as some of the other sites, but the vintage look of all the photos is really the draw here. Definitely worth looking at if you need something unique or vintage looking. 

6 // Reshot

Reshot is one of the best sites for finding icons and illustrations rather than photographed images. There are a wide variety of options to choose from and the illustrations are colorful and vibrant. If your themes tend to lend themselves to these types of images, this is really a great site to check out.

7 // 123RF

123RF is a site full of graphical creations, photos, vectors, videos, and more. This site does have a good amount of free items, but also has an even larger amount of content you can get through purchasing. The reason this site made the list is because so much of their content is social friendly and can be sized from the start for different platforms. If you spend a lot of time posting to multiple social media platforms, this site could save you hours of cropping and editing.

8 // Flikr

Flikr has been around for a long time and continues to be a great site for photos. Flikr has a massive photo library that they make freely available for download and use. Flikr also keeps track of trends so you can use the newest and most popular photos when needed. One thing I really like about Flikr is the amount of different nature photography they have available. Sometimes, the large selection of photos can make it difficult to find exactly what to choose, but overall, a great resource for finding great photos.

As you begin using these sites and building the “vibe” of your brand, you’ll probably find that you’re favoring one site more than some of the others. That’s ok. Keep these others around so you have more options if you need to change things up or you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for.

Have a favorite site you use? Comment below and tell us about it!