25 Sites Where You Can Get Superb Free Stock Images

You always need free stock images for your blog or social media

The days of using Google Image Search to find images to download is over. Apart from the quality aspect, there are problems with the ownership of images indexed by Google. If you want free stock photos for commercial and personal use, you need to make sure that the images you use are copyright free.

You should also check if there are any attribution required notes on the image license. Most royalty free stock photography and images have a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons licenses are one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created.

There is also a Creative Commons cc0 license where owners of copyright- or database-protected content waive those interests in their works and place them as completely as possible in the public domain. If you are looking for high-quality free photos for your blog, you should always check that you have the right to use a free stock photo for commercial purposes and that you do not need to credit the image source.

Royalty free stock photos are generally not high-resolution images.  Most sites offering a collection of free photos and images allow you to download a low-resolution version. 

However, in most cases, these stock images are perfectly suitable to use for online use such as on your blog or for social media headers and posts. If you need an image for a book cover, you should always buy high quality, high-resolution image.

However, if you only need images for your blog posts, you can get top quality free images for almost any topic including food, pet, landscape, people, vehicle and place images just to name a few.

The best sites to search for free stock photos

If you want to avoid the hassle of registering or signing up to use stock photo sites, there are many sites that do not require your name or email address. Most often, like all sites offering free stuff, they are advertising supported or have links to sponsored sites or products.

The sheer volume of sites now offering images for is growing every day. I was amazed by how many new sites I found when I was doing my research for this post. But my criteria for choosing to list a free image site below was that each site was genuinely free with no sign up required.

Each site also had to offer an extensive range of quality images that were suitable for all types of bloggers and for social media use. Most importantly, each site below uses CC0 Creative Commons licenses that are completely free for commercial use with no attribution required.

So let’s get you started on finding some new sites to find fantastic and beautiful free images for you. The sites below are in alphabetical order. Each example image is from the listed site.

So, take your pic!

25 Sites For Superb Free Images And Photos

1. Burst

2. Epicantus

3. Foodiesfeed

4. Freestocks

5. Gratisography

6. Jay Mantri

7. Kaboompics

8. Life of Pix

9. Little Visuals

10. MMT Stock

11. Morguefile

12. New Old Stock

13. Pexels

14. Picjumbo

15. Picography

16. Pik Wizard

17. Pixabay

18. Reshot

19. Shot Stash

20. Skitter Photo

21. Stock Snap

22. Stock Vault

23. Styled Stock

24. Unsplash

25. Wikipedia

If you are feeling generous

All of these sites offer fantastic free stock photos and images covering every possible theme or topic you could imagine. Every one of them has a search function, so you will be able to find exactly what you are looking for in no time at all. But if you use one site a lot, maybe you could consider crediting the photographer, or as some sites hint, buy them a cup of coffee.

These are all terrific resources, for free. But it might be nice to return the favor once in a while. You can use these stock images to create free ebook covers or to make stunning featured images for your blog posts.

Do I have a favorite? Well, yes. For me, Pixabay is the pick of the bunch. But whichever one you choose, you will probably find an image that suits your needs.