Royalty free, high resolution stock photos without a watermark, free photos for blogs or commercial use
In digital marketing, you need high-quality photos for just about everything you do — blog posts, social media posts, emails and website design. It’s a visual world, and it’s a proven fact that posts with relevant photos get about 94% more views and 35% more shares, — more engagement, more likes, retweets, comments, and links, than posts without images.
If you’re writing blog posts, building websites, or posting on Social Media, you’re going to need a good source of free high quality photos.
When creating articles for your blog, photos are just to support the content, so the less time you have to spend finding them, the better. Right?
Don’t just do a Google image search, steal somebody else’s image, and hope for the best. If you violate someone’s license for their creative work, they can (and often do) come after you for compensation. We have seen people faced with demands for payments of more than a thousand dollars for this, it’s just not worth the risk.
You can get thousands of excellent quality, high resolution stock photos for free, you just need to know where to look.
Many very talented photographers have generously provided their photos free for your unrestricted use. They don’t require attribution, but if you can, it’s always good to give credit where it’s due.
Where to get royalty free stock photos for blogs or commercial use
You’ll will find plenty of articles with lists of websites for royalty free stock photos — ‘172 of the best royalty free stock photos’, for example.
Who’s got time for that? By the time you’ve searched through a massive list of sites, only to find that many of them aren’t free, you can’t modify them, or you have to include an attribution statement every time you use them, you might as well have just paid for the photo. It would have saved a lot of time and been cheaper in the long run.
Below is a quick & easy list of sites where you can get royalty free stock photos, without having to join and in many cases, you don’t need to make links back to the source. It’s not the biggest list, just in our opinion, the best list. So you can get on with your business, rather than wasting time looking for photos.
Restrictions on free stock photos
Creative Commons Licenses come in several different flavors, with different limitations. Some enable completely free, unrestricted use, and others have limitations, or require attribution (either a link, or a statement of where the photo came from).
Depending upon your use of the photograph, attribution may or not be a problem. If there are any restrictions, those should be stated when you go to download the photos.
Please let us know, if you find any dead links or sites that no longer belong on this page.
Public Domain Photos
Public Domain photos have no copyright, and can be used by anybody for anything. No attribution is required.
Without further ado, below is our top 25 list of royalty free stock photo sites:
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Albumarium features a stock library of high resolution images intended for personal as well as for commercial use. No image attribution is required, however, as with any site, it’s definitely a good idea to check on copyright privileges before you download from their medium-sized gallery. Membership is also not requirement.
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Burst has a selection of free eCommerce images that are great for your eCommerce store or website. They have images that can accommodate several different industries. You have the rights to copy and modify these images for your online store.
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Cupcake. Photographer Jonas Nilsson Lee offers free images in a small gallery to the public. Attribution is not required. Not searchable, but the images are high resolution and amazing.
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DesignersPics are copyright-free photos by photographer, web designer and developer Jeshu John. Searchable, high resolution images, with no membership necessary, and attribution is not required. The gallery size is small but the images are excellent.
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Stockvault is a free stock photo community where photographers & artists can share their own photos and artwork with people from all over the world. They offer thousands of pictures and illustrations of people, animals, buildings and street photography. All of their stock photos images & vectors are 100% free.
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Every Stock Photo is a large image gallery with photos from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo’s license by clicking on the license icon. You’ll find that many of the images are high resolution, including stock from Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, and much more.
Although Every Stock Photo is a great resource, searching at times may be a little challenging, and the small thumbnails are, well…small. -
FindA.Photo specializes in searching for photos by color. You can search by color and even color hex code (such as: #60a8d8). Most of their images are in the public domain, however it is suggested that you check the status of the license before you download. Searchable, No Membership Required, and you may want to check if you need attribution first. Images are high resolution.
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Free Nature Stock is a brand new searchable, high resolution image library, provided by designer and photographer Adrian Pelletier. Membership is not required, and attribution isn’t either. The Gallery size is small, but worth a look.
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Stokepic has free high resolution stock photos for commercial use under the (Stokpic License) Basically You can do anything apart from redistribute.
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GetRefe provides an impressive repository of high resolution images that are absolutely free, mainly images of nature or urban scenes. Not Searchable, and a small gallery but membership is not required and you may find the exact image you are looking for.
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Good Free Photos has free public domain photos, featuring images from travels across the United States and all over the planet. Their medium-sized high resolution Gallery is searchable, without needing a membership or having to give any image attribution. Images are categorized by location and type.
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Gratisography is the creation of the very talented photographer Ryan McGuire, who provides his high resolution images available for free. His high quality, high resolution images are a mix of humor, emotion and excellent composition. Although attribution isn’t required, it is appreciated. Gallery size is small but packed with compelling imagery. Non-searchable.
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ISO Republic provides high resolution images by photographer Tom Eversley. Their medium sized gallery of high quality, high resolution photos for are perfect for creatives. Membership or attribution isn’t required.
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Jay Mantri photographer, shares seven of his newest high quality photos every Thursday. You can use the images however you want, and there’s no need for membership or attribution.
The images in his small, yet robust gallery are loaded with atmosphere, mood, and sense of space and panorama. No search, but quality vs. quantity rules here. -
Life of Pix imposes no copyright restrictions on any of its images. Their photographs have been donated from Canadian firm Leeroy Advertising Agency. You are allowed to use their public domain images for your project, whether it’s personal or commercial. Not searchable, and the gallery is small… but membership or attribution is not required,.
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Magdeleine curates free high resolution images from all over the internet. What makes Magdeleine worth checking out, is that you can search their small to medium-sized gallery, by keywords, color, category, or by license. Although every one of their images are free, not all are attribution free. You will probably want to check out the image’s license before downloading.
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MMT is the work of photographer Jeffrey Betts released to public domain. There are mainly nature images, that show exactly how much he excels at high resolution macro shots. His small but powerful gallery is updated weekly with new and exciting images.
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morgueFile. Being one of the oldest and best high resolution image repositories on the web, they have definitely got it right, with searching free images, made easy. You can click on and download any image right from the same screen, without having to worry about losing your place on the page. Their site is very searchable, and they have an endless image gallery.
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New Old Stock. If you’re looking for an old school high resolution image, check out New Old Stock’s collection of searchable retro, copyright free images, curated by Cole Townsend. A combination of the nostalgic and the whimsical from yesteryear, their well-stocked, medium-sized gallery requires no membership or attribution of their images.
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Pexels provides hand-selected images, curated from a variety of sources on the web. With over 1600 photos, and 30 more being added by Pexels every week…you are sure to find just exactly the right one for your project. Membership and attribution are not required to use their large gallery, although you may want to check an image as to whether it needs attribution. Their high resolution gallery is also easily searchable.
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Photober provides a medium-sized gallery of free photos, many of which are high resolution for many image needs. Their free photo site is searchable with no membership required for their use.
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Picography is a simple gallery with gorgeous, excellent quality high resolution images. Picography is a free stock photo site that you can search with no membership or attribution required. Even though their gallery is small, it has the added benefit of your being able to subscribe, for their newest images.
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Pixabay If you’re looking for the best resource for stock photos, Pixabay is top-notch. They have made it easy to search their large gallery for whatever type of images you are looking for. Membership is not a requirement, though joining up is free and doing so lets you bypass the ‘Captcha’ for each photo you would want to download. Images on Pixabay do not require attribution, but it’s always best to check before you use one.
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Realistic Shots provides free stock photos (high resolution) for personal and commercial use. 7 new photos are added every week.
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Unsplash and re:splashed. Unsplash is one of the first and best in terms of interesting, high quality Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos. Re:splashed is a searchable, based on photo tags, version of Unsplash.
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