I’ve been working with design for over 10 years and in that time I’ve used several free stock photos. In this post I will share the best ones according to my experience in practice.
Image can get your message across clearly and quickly without using any words, even if that message targeted people from countries, cultures and languages. Since the digital camera revolution, the popularization of photography has become something that can help your advertising campaign or personal project. In the past it was necessary to hire a photographic studio, photographer, model, costumes etc, only in very specific cases is it necessary to do this nowadays.
Gone are the days that the only paid stock image options like Shutterstock, Dreamstime, 123RF just to name a few.
Best Free Stock Photos Websites
I’m going here to list some of the free stock photo I use in my work:
1. PIXABAY
Collection of more than 2 million images in high resolution. Besides the photos you can download free vectors, vectors, music and videos. A large community of artists is there and you can follow them and buy a coffee as a thank you for their work.
2. PEXELS
Awesome images that really look like they came out of a premium site, hundreds of thousands of free photos that have been added by the community and selected to keep the standard high. The site promotes prize money challenges for members, this is a great way to engage the community and spark creativity.
3. UNSPLASH
Here you can use an image to search for some visually similar photos, a feature that can save you a lot of time. With over 2 million free images and a huge community of over 200,000 photographers. Companies like BuzzFeed, Squarespace and Trello use the Unsplash collection. The submitted photos undergo rigorous curation.
Right of Use for Free Stock Photo
Almost all images from these sites are licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). That is, they are allowed to be copied, used, adapted and commercially used without the authorization of the authors. Here you will have more information about CC0 license
