High-quality photos are essential for creating projects, building websites, creating advertisements, magazines, newspapers, ebooks, software applications. The price of high-quality royalty-free images depends on its resolution. The single stock photos cost may vary between $1 to $15. Most stock photo agency offers bulk pricing. But for personal use, it is not economical. Then where did you get free stock photos for your next project?
There is a number of websites offering free stock photos, from where you can download free stock photos and illustrations for websites, advertising materials, newspapers, magazines, book covers and pages, ebooks, music artwork, and software applications. The free photos and illustrations are ideal for business, personal and educational use. Here are some sites offering free high-quality photos and videos that anyone can use on their project.
Pexels
(https://www.pexels.com/)
Pixels offers free photos to creators to easily create products and designs. The photos are tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through pixels discover pages. If you are a photographer or passion to take stunning photos pexels blog will provide you enough inspiration from real photographers.
Unsplash
(https://unsplash.com/)
Unsplash was founded in 2013 as a Tumblr blog, the site offers 1 million free high-resolution images from a generous community of photographers.
Pixabay
(https://pixabay.com/)
Pixabay is another free-to-use website for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and video footage. In 2019 Canva acquired Pixabay and Pexels. As per Pixabay FAQ, you can copy, modify, distribute, and use the images, even for commercial purposes, all without asking for permission or giving credits to the artist. You can also use Pixabay images on social media platforms.
Stockvault
(https://www.stockvault.net/)
Stockvault collects and archives high-resolution photographs that photographers, designers, and students can share and use for their personal and non-commercial design projects. Stockvault supports revenue sharing program, to start this, sign up as a user and upload 25 photos. Then insert your Paypal, Skrill and AdSense codes to start earning money. The site visitors can support photographers directly by clicking the Coffee link placed below the download button on photo detail pages and can donate via Paypal or Skrill.
Pixnio
(https://pixnio.com/)
Pixnio is a repository for high-quality public domain photos-no rights reserved images. All photos on this site are explicitly placed in the public domain. You can use any image from this site for whatever you want, use it freely for any personal and commercial use.
Rawpixel
(https://www.rawpixel.com/)
Raw pixels offers free and premium stock photos. They retain the copyright for all images marked with the free license. Although you are free to use this content for a variety of different purposes including commercial use, certain uses are not permitted like reselling the images or add it to a site where it can be freely downloaded.
Reshot
(https://www.reshot.com/)
All photos from Reshot are free for commercial and editorial use, under the Reshot License. You are free to crop, filter, add text, or modify the photos as needed. The free stock photos on Reshot are sourced from individual contributors and via partnerships with other photography communities.
Pikwizard
(https://pikwizard.com/)
Pikwizard is a source to get free photos and videos for your project. You can see the most popular photos and videos in Pikwizard using the Most popular. Pikwizard blog offers tips and advice for content creators to start a new venture.
Flickr
(https://www.flickr.com/)
Flickr the popular image and video hosting service. It was created in 2004, has changed its ownership several times and now owned by SmugMug. Flickr also has a pool of public domain photos to download.
There are a number of sites like Stocksnap, free-images, freeimages.com, Canva, kaboompics, etc. offering free photos and videos. With sites like Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, and Rawpixel around, it is today easier to find free photos and videos for your next project.
Should you use free photos
But there are some problems when using a free photo. To use a photo commercially, the owner must grant permission for the element to be used commercially. If the photo include models, a model release accepting their image to be used to be assured. There are some rights associated with each photo like model rights, property rights, trademark, and copyright. To use a photo commercially, the photographer obtains a legal document known as a release from every right holder in the photo. These free stock photo sites may not collect such releases. There are now several debates are going on about the usage of free stock photos on the internet, you can go through the discussion to find out what’s wrong with free photos.
In free stock photo websites, you can see sponsored images. These sponsored images are shown to finance the free stock photo site. Sponsored photos are featured from partners that you can buy. By clicking on a sponsored photo, you’ll be taken to their website where you can start a trial or buy the photo. Now you will get an idea about how the free stock photo agencies work and things to notice before going to use a free stock photo from a free stock photo website.
