Best Places To Find Free Photos Online

Top Sites For Free Stock Photos

If you’ve got a website, then you’ve probably searched frantically for free photos at one time or another.

Following are the best places to find free stock photos for your personal website, online newsletters, and more.

Is there a catch to using photos from these free photo sites?

Nope. The sites listed below offer legitimately FREE stock photos with no royalties or licenses required. (You don’t have to buy anything.) The only “catch” is that some (not all) of the sites make you register first — with a username and password only — before you can start downloading the free photos. That’s it!

Most of these don’t even require attribution, which means you don’t have to give credit to the photographer.

List Of Free Stock Photo Sites

Okay, If you’re wondering where to find free photos online…

These are the best free stock photo sites that I’ve found (and used myself!) so far: 

• Adobe Stock
• Burst
• Digital Public Library of America
• Flickr
• Free Range Stock
• Free Images
• Gratisography
• Kaboompics
• Morguefile
• NegativeSpace
• Pexels
• Picjumbo
• PikWizard
• Pixabay
• Public Domain Pictures
• Raw Pixel
• Snappy Goat
• Stocksnap
• Unsplash
• Vecteezy
• Visual Hunt

Good To Know Before You Use Free Photos

Two important things to remember:

1. Even though all of the above sites offers free stock photos, be sure to read the terms and license fees for each individual photo that you plan to use — especially if you’re using it for business or commercial purposes. Sometimes, limitations still apply.
2. Most sites that offer free photos also sell photos as well. So, each time you use a free photo site‘s own search tool, be sure you’re looking only at the free stock photos that show up — because pictures that you can purchase will also show up in the search results!

Downsides Of Using Free Photo Sites

Personally… while I still use the free stock photo sites once in awhile, I’ve found 3 big downsides:

1. I quickly got tired of seeing the exact same image that I had used in an article show up on other websites. It’s perfectly legal and legit… but it doesn’t make your stuff very unique.
2. The number of photos that turn up when you search the site for a specific word (like “dog” or “flower”) on most of the free stock photo sites is relatively limited — compared to the paid photo sites.
3. It’s a relatively slow and tedious process to find a “great” photo on the free photo sites, simply because most of them are not well-organized. That, or their database is just too small — so you end up having to check a bunch of the free stock photo sites just to find one photo that’s unique and that you like.

My Favorite Subscription-Based Photo Sites

So after relying on the free stock photo sites for awhile (when I first started my blog), I eventually set out to find the best, most affordable photo subscription service to try.

Through the years, I’ve tried a number of them.

My favorites are:

• DepositPhotos
• iStockPhotos
• Shutterstock

I use Shutterstock and iStockPhotos on occasion. But I tend to get the majority of my pics from DepositPhotos these days. (Whenever I’m not able to create the perfect photo myself, that is.)

Yes, I do try to use original photos as much as possible. And you should, too. Because that’s what makes your site… your article… and your photo truly unique among all of the others that can be found on the internet.

After personally trying out many of the most-reputable photo sites out there, I think Deposit Photos is the best paid photo site for these reasons:

• It has the best prices.
• They have literally thousands of photos to choose from for practically any word you search!
• The photos do not require attribution.
• The photos are categorized and tagged really well.
• It’s easy to save your favorites to folders — in case you decide to download them later.
•  And did I mention it’s the most affordable one I’ve found?

I have the Flexible Plan at Deposit Photos — photos are $1 apiece and you get 25 downloads per month. If you don’t use all of your 25 in any given month (and you’ve chosen “auto-renew”), any unused photo downloads carry over to the next month — for the entire time that you remain a subscriber! So I don’t “waste” photo downloads anymore — like I used to with other photo subscription services. I LOVE that part!

Bottom line: If you don’t want all of the images that you use to look identical to others’ photos on the Internet, then you might want to look into a photo subscription service like DepositPhotos, Shutterstock, or iStockPhotos.