The tool’s additional plugins also let you access and edit stock photos directly from within Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD, Figma, or Sketch. Finding images that are free for commercial use isn’t as hard as it might sound, thanks to a number of sites that aggregate photos, illustrations, and vectors. These sites usually let you search and filter by keyword or category, making it easy to find what you’re looking for.
You can search for something specific, or browse by themes including pastimes, emotions, and locations. If you’re looking for something a bit quirky, Gratisography – a collection of pictures by talented photographer and graphic designer Ryan McGuire – is perfect. Ryan’s photos often have a surreal edge, and are brilliant if you’re sick of dull stock photo clichés; there are no women laughing alone with salad here.
Best free stock photos site for a variety of media types
Gratisography is very selective about the photos that are released on the site, so you won’t have to filter through low-quality images in order to find the good stuff. There are very few sites that offer a higher quantity of free resources than Pixabay, but Pixabay lags behind in terms of quality. You’ll certainly find some outstanding photos and other resources at Pixabay, but there are also some lower-quality resources that you’ll need to sort through.
Picjumbo is different from the other sites on this list because most of the photos are taken by a single photographer, Viktor Hanacek. Don’t let that fool you though, there are still thousands of photos on the site, and you’ll love the quality of this free stock photography. And although they make up a small fraction of Adobe’s overall stock photography offering, the selection of free content is still very significant. In addition to the free stock photos, Canva also offers an even bigger selection of premium stock photos (more than 100 million) that can be accessed through a Canva Pro subscription.
Best free stock photos site for vintage photos
You can even explore galleries and search specific photographers’ collections by clicking on their usernames. When reviewing these sites, I visited each one and signed up for an account if necessary. I explored the site’s menus and conducted a number of searches to see what types of photos would come up. Founded in 2000, Dreamstime was one of the early players in the microstock business and still has an enthusiastic community supporting them, not least because it’s so cheap.
When testing the best free stock photo site, we’re looking at how each individual platform compares with top asset libraries. PikWizard offers thousands of free stock photos across a broad range of subjects. The quality is impressive and – unusually for a free stock photography site – there are lots of photos depicting people in natural poses.
Explore free photos by some of the most-searched topics
Founded in 1995, Getty is the OG of modern stock libraries and boasts a collection of over 200 million assets, including photographs, videos, and music tracks. It offers a range of licensing options for its assets, which can be used for various creative and editorial purposes. But while the quality is typically high, the prices for both subscriptions and credit packs are too. The free stock photos you’ll find at Deposit Photos are professional-quality high-resolution images. Like Adobe Stock, Deposit Photos is another leading stock photo site that offers a nice selection of free stock photos, videos, and vectors.
When you’re browsing or searching at Vecteezy, there are several helpful filters you can use to quickly narrow your search and find exactly what you’re looking for. The color filter is especially awesome because you can quickly find photos that feature a specific color and will work with your brand’s color palette. Of course, you can also filter by license type if you want to see only the free photos. Whether you need a stock photo, stunning vector image, HD video clips, or Adobe Photoshop template, Adobe Stock has the perfect stock images, videos, and more to help you tell your story. Once you’ve found a suitable free stock photo, choose an appropriate resolution (print projects will need a much higher resolution than online ones) and complete a Captcha to download the file.
Best for web design
Run a search for an image, and then click the Any license dropdown menu and select Commercial use allowed. And unlike most free image sites, New Old Stock doesn’t offer any way to filter photos. If you’re feeling lucky, though, click the magnifying glass in the upper-left corner of the site, type in a search phrase, and you may strike (vintage) gold. With more than five million photos and multiple plugins, Unsplash is one of the most easily accessible and largest collections of stock photos available. Not everyone has the time or inclination to learn how to create prompts to get the results they want—and even then, AI-generated photos aren’t consistent in quality or relevance.
- If you’re a designer, content creator, or social media influencer, you know how important high-quality photos and visual resources are to your work.
- If you want to get creative without leaving your browser, PikWizard provides links to an online photo editor.
- All of the creative content at Pexels has been submitted by a large and growing team of contributors.
- If you’re feeling lucky, though, click the magnifying glass in the upper-left corner of the site, type in a search phrase, and you may strike (vintage) gold.
- They also opened up submissions so other photographers could upload their own free stock photos.
You can search by color or hex color code, which can bring photo results that match the exact colors you’re searching for. It’s always worth checking before you download a photo though, as there may be exceptions. And if you’re a budding photographer yourself, you can even click Camera Finder under the Explore dropdown to see the most popular cameras currently being used in the Flickr community. There are a number of different categories and collections you can browse through, and of course, you can also search the site. You don’t need to be logged in to download at Pixabay, but there are a few advantages to creating a free account and logging in.
When you’re embarking on a creative project, you’d ideally have the budget to commission bespoke photography shoots to perfectly fit your brief. But not every client can afford that kind of money, so sometimes you need to find a more affordable alternative. You won’t find a massive selection at Gratisography, and that’s not what this site is all about. Instead, you’ll find interesting photos that stand out from those at other sites.
AI is revolutionizing most online spaces, and stock photos are no exception. With the advent of generative AI, it’s possible to feed your exact specifications into an AI image generator like Midjourney and get a unique, often sophisticated, result. The ability to generate fresh new photos that match your exact needs might mean stock photos will soon become a thing of the past. Our best apps roundups are written by humans who’ve spent much best stock photography for designers of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We’re never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review.
You’ll find more than 2.5 million free resources here, including photos, videos, music, and vectors. Currently, Canva does not offer videos, vectors, or other types of creative content, aside from the templates that use Canva’s design software. Unsplash is a popular resource because they have a huge collection and because the photos are, for the most part, high-quality. Most of the photos you’ll find at Unsplash don’t have the stereotypical stock photo look that everyone wants to avoid.