Whether you want to demonstrate a point or add clarity, images play an important role in content creation. Whether you’re a designer, writer, artist, programmer or any other creator, images are now part and parcel of our lives. Whether you’re building a business website, creating a print brochure, crafting a digital or magazine ad, or some other brilliant creative project, you know that a great image helps your content transcend good and become great.
Compelling, eye-catching, attention-grabbing work on the web especially needs sharp, arresting visual images to succeed. At one point or another you may require to use image(s) in your work, unfortunately not all images you come across maybe free to use. Some of the images are copyrighted and their use may land you in legal trouble. Whereas you may subscribe to Getty Images, Shutterstock or iStock for access to images you may need, there are other free alternatives to source those images.
1. Pixabay
Pixabay is an international, copyleft and free-to-use website for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and film footage. All video and image files available on the platform can be used without attribution requirement and also for commercial aim. Pixabay’s license prohibits the sale of unaltered copies of the licensed works, or distribution as stock images or wallpapers.
2. Unsplash
Unsplash is a website dedicated to sharing stock photography under the Unsplash license. Unsplash allows photographers to upload photos to its website, which are then curated by a team of photo editors. The permissive copyright terms on its photos have led to Unsplash becoming one of the largest photography suppliers on the internet.
Some of Unsplah members’ photos frequently appear on articles. Unsplash’s license terms restricts the sale of photos without first updating, modifying, or otherwise incorporating new creative elements into the photos, prohibiting selling unaltered copies, including selling the photos as prints or printed on physical goods.
3. Pexels
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Pexels license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through its discover pages. Only free images from its community of photographers are added to its photo database.
4. StockSnap
StockSnap offer sbeautiful, high quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of – including commercial usage – for free. You’ll find no complicated credit requirements or expensive pricing schemes based on usage. In fact, all of their images are absolutely free to use, for absolutely any purpose whatsoever.
5. Burst
Burst is a free stock photo platform that is powered by Shopify. Their image library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images that were shot by their global community of photographers. You can use their pictures for just about anything – your website, blog or online store, school projects, Instagram ads, facebook posts, desktop backgrounds, client work and more. All their photos are free for commercial use with no attribution required.
6. Google Image Search
Google Image Search allows you to filter images by usage rights to avoid copyright issues. The downside is that, the images on Google Image Search tend to be pretty generic and not all that aesthetically pleasing. They are generally of lower quality and have a less professional compared to stock photography. Here’s how to filter images on Google:
- Search for any term and head to the Images section in Google, you’ll instantly find thousands of images
- Click on Tools. This will expand a drop down menu that lets you sort the images by their license
- Depending on what you need (you might want to use the image as it is or make certain modifications to it) select the category that best fits your intended usage
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