Whether it is a business, a website , presentation or an educational report, a picture is crucial for proper presentation. Using a copyrighted image is illegal and can even get you sued, and hiring professional models or visiting faraway places for photography is quite expensive. Fortunately, there are stock photos available that you can easily get for free or very cheap.

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, vectors, and more. These sites usually let you search and filter by keyword or category, making it easy to find what you're looking for.

Free stock images are a great resource for bloggers and web owners to source photos for their featured blog images, to use on social media and to use within articles, guides and blog posts. It’s also benefits those who have just ventured down the route of starting a blog and who need inspirational and striking imagery to make their sites look awesome from the get go.

We’re helping you with a list of websites that provides you free high-quality, beautiful stock photos. These are our own personal favorite places to find photos when we need images for our own blogs, social media, or client websites. You can use any photos from these websites however you would like!

20 Best Websites to Find Free Stock Photos in 2020

Pexels

Pexels is one of the top free stock photo websites today, highly suitable for bloggers and designers to find high quality and based on Creative-Commons license which means you can use them freely for personal or commercial purposes, and you don’t have to provide any attribution. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through their discover pages.

Unsplash

Unsplash offers a large collection of free high-resolution photos and has become one of the best sources for stock images. Unsplash is a website dedicated to sharing stock photography under the Unsplash license. The website claims over 110,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 11 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 1.5 million photos.

The Unsplash team combs through new submissions and features the very best photos on their homepage. All photos are released for free under the Unsplash license.

Pixabay

If you need a professional-looking illustration—i.e., a hand-drawn image or a computer-generated graphic—you should begin your search here. Royalty-free illustrations can be tricky to find on many free image sites, but Pixabay has loads of them. Just click Images, select Illustrations, enter in your search terms, and that's that.

Pixabay offers a large collection of free stock photos, vectors and art illustrations. All photos are released under Creative Commons CC0.

StockSnap

StockSnap hosts thousands of high-resolution images that are all free to use for commercial use. With a massive library of carefully curated photographer submitted stock photos to choose from, StockSnap is another fantastic source to find photos for nearly any purpose.

StockSnap offers an intuitive search experience. You can search for photos by date added, most and least viewed, most and least downloaded, and most and least favorites.

StockSnap also has an easy to use tagging system, making it simple to find a broad range of photos based on a variety of convenient categories.

Gratisography

Gratisography offers free high-resolution pictures you can use on your personal and commercial projects. Gratisography claims to have the world’s quirkiest collection of stock photos, and after browsing through their library one would be hard pressed to disagree.

Photos are organized into nine different categories: Animals, Business, Fashion, Food, Nature, Objects, People, Urban, and Whimsical. New awesome pictures are added weekly and are free of copyright restrictions. All pictures are captured by Ryan McGuire of Bells Design. Their library is still rather small, but overall very enjoyable to scroll through.

Canva

Canva is a web-based graphic design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content.

The company also offers a library of upwards of one million free images you can use for any purpose.

Canva’s free images are provided via the same licenses as paid images. You’re welcome to use them with your choice of license, though the Free Images License has the most rights (least restrictions). You may export them as many times as you need in as many designs as you like, as long as your use of the designs complies with the license terms.

Burst

Shopify brings you Burst, its free stock photos for websites and commercial use. Browse photo collections or discover the "top free pics of the week", all to suit different themes and purposes.

The image library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images that were shot by our global community of photographers.

Burst was launched to help entrepreneurs make better products, websites, and marketing campaigns. Most of the pictures are original photos that were taken in-house and are themed around trending business niches — everything from DIY beard oil to Aliexpress LED sneakers.

You can also find more general photographs as well. All of Burst’s high resolution images are under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which means that you’re free to do with them as you please (including any modification), all without needing to credit the original photographer.

Freestocks

Free Stock Photos is a great website to find free stock photos that can be used for both personal and commercial projects. Freestock offers a wide range of high quality photos all released under Creative Commons CC0. Most of the website’s images are submitted by a single photographer, Asia Malinowski, but there are a few other contributing photographers as well. Due to this, the images on freestocks.org are of an exceptionally high-quality, although the library isn’t huge, with just over 1,100 photos available.

For anyone looking for stock photos that are a bit more unique and artistically shot, freestocks.org is a great place to start.

Freepik

Freepik is a source for free vectors, PSDs, icons, and photos. The platform uploads over 80 000 exclusive free resources every month, designed by Freepik's team or the community of graphic designers and vector artists contributors.

Stockvault

Stockvault.net is another free stock photo website with larger collections of high resolution photos. All their content is user submitted by photographers, students, and designers. More than just photos, stockvault.net features graphics, textures, wallpapers, and vector files, all free of charge. With such a wide offering, stockvault.net is good for people in just about any industry.

Kaboompics

Kaboompics is another impressive stock photography repository available in the market right now. With an easy user interface and intuitive search engine, you can get straight to what you want. The website offers thousands of stock photos – all for free. Kaboom Pics is especially wonderful as it considers the complementary colour palette of each of its free stock photographs. So if you need something specific to match your design, then Kaboom should be your first port of call.

All pictures on Kaboompics were taken by one, probably very busy, woman who specializes in taking stock photographs. A unique feature of Kaboompics is the ability to search photos by the color palette present within them, as well as by keyword, making it easier to find photos that will match your aesthetic.

Death to Stock

Death to Stock” is a unique, artist-owned corporation that provides authentic stock photos and videos. This Website provides you with the most stunning and unique photos. With this free stock photo website, you get unlimited downloads. The best part is that they upload fresh content every month.

With the free plan, you get about 35 images each month. To download more images and have access to a more diverse library of images, you would need to upgrade to a paid membership. The paid plans start from $12 per month and go up to $399 (billed annually).

Picjumbo

Picjumbo is a totally free high-resolution photos for your commercial & personal use. New photos are added daily from a wide variety of categories including abstract, fashion, nature, technology and much more.

Currently, picjumbo has over five million downloads from users all across the globe. The site is updated with new photos regularly, and is used primarily by marketers, designers, and bloggers.

ShotStash

ShotStash offers a very wide range of photos, and you can take your pick, because they add new images every day under a free for commercial and personal use license.

SplitShire

SplitShare is a simple free stock photos website. It is not a huge website, but it has some very creative photos with high resolution. SplitShire’s primary focus is on boosting creativity. Apart from the photographs, you get free videos, as well.

There is also a premium subscription that will let you download photos in bulk. Even if you use free version, you can still access all the photos, but you will have to manually search and download each photo.

Reshot

If you’re looking for a beautifully curated collection of stock photos, Reshot is worth checking out. Reshot is particularly popular among startups and freelancers. Reshot provides the world's best-emerging photographers with a beautiful platform for sharing a sampling of their best work for free use in creative projects.

All the photos are submitted by various photographers from around the world, but only the best of the best are actually featured.

Life of Pix

Life of Pix is one of the most popular free stock photography websites on this list. Life of Pix is home to some awesome high-resolution photos. All of the images are donated to the public domain, and are available for personal and commercial use

It engages its endorsers with awards like ‘Photographer of the Year,’ which encourages them to post excellent stock images and videos.

If you’re a regular user looking for images, you can create your own profile, personalize your photos, and follow your favorite photographers.

Jay Mantri

Designer Jay Mantri has built up an impressive gallery of professional, high quality images. Jay Mantri posts seven new photos to his site each week that are free to use in any way you please. And he wants you to “make magic” with them.

While the style of photos on the site vary, many of them have a rather funky feel, including a series of photos featuring common objects and sunglasses.

Getty Images

Getty Images is one of the biggest website for free images with over 35 million stock photos available for free. However, they charge for the commercial use of their photos. You can use photos from Getty Images for personal use, editorial use or even on blogs, etc. for illustration purposes. But you can’t use them for advertising of a company or products, and other similar commercial use.

Foodiesfeed

If you are running a food blog or food business, such as restaurant then you will need decent stock image of some delicious food. Foodies Feed is where it's at. It’s a stock photos site that offers naturally looking food photos that are completely free to download.

The website is comprised of a worldwide community of food photographers who offer their images 100% free of charge under the CC0 license.

From yummy picks of cake to delicious shots of pizza, it’s got the quality to be a great platform for food bloggers. The site has a simple design and also offers some handy tools to filter images. And if you like specific images, you can share them via email and even social sites like Facebook, and Twitter.

More Free Stock Photo Websites:

All The Free Stock: Free stock images, icons, and videos.

Visual Hunt: High quality free photos in one place.

Splashbase: Search & discover free, hi res photos & videos.

Startup Stock Photos: Free photos for startups, bloggers and everyone.

Moveast: This is a journey of a portuguese guy moving east.

Travel Coffee Book: Sharing beautiful travel moments.

Mazwai: Free creative commons HD video clips & footages.

Jéshoots: New modern free photos.

Super Famous: Photos by Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter.

Picography: Free images to use however you like.

The Stocks: The best free photos in one place.

Magdeleine: A free high-resolution photo every day.

Little Visuals: 7 hi-res images in your inbox every 7 days.

New Old Stock: Vintage photos from the public archives.

Getrefe: Free photos.

Snapographic: Free stock photos for personal & commercial use.

Public Domain Archive: New 100% free stock photos.

IM Free: A curated collection of free resources.

Cupcake: A photographer’s treat by Jonas Nilsson Lee.

The Pattern Library: Free patterns for your projects.

FreePhotos.cc - FreePhotos.cc is a free resource where you can find creative commons photos for your website or print projects

Freerange: Once you complete a free registration process, you will get access to high-resolution stock photos. The website allows you to use these images for commercial or personal projects.

FreeImages: Free Images is the free stock photo site with thousands of high-resolution images from which to choose.

Morguefile: Morguefile is one of the oldest websites with free quality images. You can use all images without restrictions for commercial and personal use.

Google Image Search: Finally, the Google Image Search helps you to find images that are in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license available on the web.

Pikwizard:Pikwizard is the new kid on the block, but don't let that put you off! They've already managed to build a huge library of photo's into their database and their simple easy to use layout is very appealing.

FOCA : FoCA offers free photos, videos, and templates. You can use these images on your website, themes, templates, print materials, and social media posts.

NegativeSpace: NeegativeSpace is a free stock photos site which provides free stock photos directly in your inbox.

Libreshot :Free to use stock photos for business, architecture, nature, people, etc.

Bigstock photo: Bigstockphoto is a website that contains a wide variety of images for commercial use. It allows you to choose license types according to the model released for editorial or non-editorial use.

Conclusion

As you can see, there’s a growing number of fantastic resources for stock photography. These websites have become a blessing for designers, marketers and bloggers. These websites have become a blessing for designers, marketers and bloggers. No need to rely on cheesy stock photos anymore!

So, you can choose any website from these top royalty-free stock photo websites, where you can download professionally-designed images both for your personal and professional needs without having to dole out any bucks. Have I missed out any notable sites? If yes, feel free to let us know their names in the comments down below. Also, share your thoughts about this roundup.