It’s no secret that having engaging and exciting content is what draws your audience in. But sometimes finding enough content for your online presence can be difficult, especially if you don’t have time to be continuously generating high quality imagery. Luckily, there are a TONNE of platforms that offer free images for your use. You’re probably now wondering, well what are they?! In this blog, we will go through our top three free image sources that we use for free stock imagery.
Before we get into our top imagery sources, there are a couple things to note about using free imagery. It is important to check the license that the imagery is under as some imagery may require you to credit the author. There is no need to worry though! We will cover the requirements of each platform that we mention.
Unsplash
Unsplash is a large online library with over 2 million free high-resolution images taken by a community of photographers. It is a source for images that can be freely used. As their license states:
- All photos can be downloaded and used for free
- They can be used for commercial and non-commercial purposes
- No permission is needed (attribution is appreciated!)
Unsplash is one of our favourite platforms to use for free imagery as they have such an incredible variety. There is a photo for everything!
Pixabay
Pixabay provides you with over 2.2 million high quality images, videos and music. That’s an impressive library of imagery and audio! Similar to Unsplash, you can use Pixabay content freely for commercial/noncommercial use across print and digital. Attribution is not required but again is highly appreciated by their community. You can also make modifications to the content from Pixabay. There are a couple of things that are not allowed, which include:
- Don’t sell unaltered copies of an image. E.g. sell an exact copy of a stock photo as a poster or print or on a physical product.
- Portray identifiable people in a bad way that is offensive.
- Don’t use images with identifiable brands to create a misleading association with a product or service.
Pixabay aims to keep things as simple as possible, therefore if you follow their few simple rules, you can produce incredible content for your business!
Pexels
Pexels provides their users with high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Pexels license. Their website is super easy to use as all photos are nicely tagged, easily searchable and easy to discover through their discover pages. Photos are added every day so you’ll never run out of amazing content!
Pexels license is also super simple to follow. Photos are free to use, attribution is not required and you are able to modify the photos and videos. Pexels allows you to use their imagery for things such as:
- On your website, blog or app
- To promote your product by creating ads, banners and marketing campaigns
- Print marketing material (e.g. flyers, postcards, magazines etc.)
- And sharing them on social media
Pexels has the same restrictions as Pixabay (see above for restrictions).
All these platforms are great for sourcing high quality imagery, we highly recommend each of them. They are all super easy to use and have an incredible range of content for you to sift through. There is no need to stress about collecting high quality and unique imagery when you have large libraries available at your very fingertips!
