These days there are endless image sites to get amazing free stock photos.
There are so many sites offering royalty-free images there is no longer any reason to take any old image from the Internet and use it on your website.
Hey, do you love this stock photo in my blog header image? It’s available exclusively from Sage Media & Marketing and free for your personal or commercial use.
What are royalty-free images?
There’s a difference between stock photos and royalty-free stock photos, although they can be one and the same.
At times.
A free stock image means you can use it free-of-charge. Royalty-free means you can use the image however you want but you may have to purchase it.
When you’re on a stock photo website, take a moment to review the terms and conditions. Sometimes you can download a free stock image but there are restrictions in how you can use it or you must credit the source and/or photographer.
Some sites allow you to use an image once for free and require you to purchase a license to use it again or in another way. Some free stock image photo sites are also royalty-free and allow you to use the images for commercial use.
There are some great commercial use, royalty-free free stock photo websites out there. And that’s important to us because we’re writers, not photographers.
We need the help!
While I do purchase stock images and take my own photos from time to time, I mix in a good amount of free stock photos on my website and social media.
Image sites to get free stock photos
Sage Media & Marketing
These images are a customized mix of flat lays and lifestyle, perfect for bloggers and small business owners alike. There are 10 free stock photos available from Sage Media & Marketing with more promised in the future.
The best part about these stock images is they aren’t available on any other stock photo website so there’s a good chance you haven’t seen them around.
If you want to up your game, Sage Media & Marketing also sells packs of 100 high quality stock photos, perfect for bloggers!
desygner
Desygner is a design solution for just about everyone. In addition to offering royalty-free images for commercial use, it is also a powerful design tool for content creation, where you can use these images on your designs or thousands of pre-designed templates that you can get for free. Honestly? It’s Canva on steroids.
Pixabay
I’ve talked about Pixabay before and I still recommend it. It’s a great place to go for general images. The free stock photography site offers more than a million images and videos including illustrations and vector graphics. It’s worth checking out.
Unsplash
Unsplash is the hipster mecca of free stock photos. These beautiful, free photos are gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers, according to the website.
All photos are licensed under Creative Commons Zero, meaning you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.
Gratisography
These quirky, creative, always free photos are toted as the world’s quirkiest collection of free high-resolution pictures. According to the website, these free stock photos are comprised of the world’s best, most creative images and are free of copyright restrictions.
New Old Stock (this is such a cool free stock photo site)
This site curates old photos for personal and non-commercial use, at minimum. Links to the original image location are provided for users to check the licensing details for themselves.
Most or all of the images available on this site are in the public domain, which means no permission is required to use these free stock photos at all.
These are a few of my go-to image sites for free stock images and I hope you find great images from them.
But if we’re taking free stock photos, how do photographers get paid?
I wanted to address this objection because this freelance lifestyle isn’t easy. And, if you’re like me, you’re friends with professional photographers and you want to support them whenever possible.
And you may be wondering if taking free stock photos is a bit hypocritical since many photographers are freelance and we work so hard to not work for free.
When you use free stock photos you’re not stealing from the photographer. Many of them are trying to make a name for themselves and are gifting their images to the community as part of their long-term strategy.
Once they gain a larger following they’re able to make money from their photography through bookings, selling images to their follows and fans, and many other income streams. They’ve decided by offering some things for free it will help them reach their career goals.
Hmm…free stock photos are much like offering free advice on blogs….
Here’s the bottom line: if you don’t feel comfortable using free stock photos then don’t. Take your own or purchase them.
There are upsides to not using free stock photos. Not only will your conscience be clear, you’re images will be unique and customized if you take them yourself. If you purchase stock photos your images will likely higher quality and less “all over the Internet.”
So there are there’s that.
Once you have great photos, here’s how to make them even better.
One more thing. You may be interested in my free resource library. This is where I keep my files, downloads, ebooks, worksheets and whatever else I manage to create. I love sharing what I learn and want to keep adding to this library so it becomes a wealth of helpful goodness.
This is a free resource but I do require a password to access the library itself. You can get access by popping your email address into the form below.
