If you have a blog or a website, you would already know that it is quite difficult to find an image that you can use on your blogpost or webpage online, as most of the images you will find have copyright. If an image has a copyright, you would need to ask permission from the owner first before using it on your website, and this permission would usually come with a price. Unfortunately, not all of us can afford spending money on images, especially if our blog or website is not yet profiting from ads and views. However, there are several websites online that you can visit to find free images that you can use by just downloading and inserting those images on your webpage or blog post. Here are some of the best sites to find free stock photos.
Flickr
Flickr is considered by many as the best free stock photo website, as it contains the broadest gallery of free stock photos with features that make it easier for you to find the photo you are looking for. Besides its vast and broad metadata, Flickr also has the geolocation information feature, which allows you to search for photos based on where they were taken. The website will provide a world map, and you can click on a specific location on that map to see the photos that were taken on your selected location.
Furthermore, Flickr also enables you to search photos by using “trending” and “recently added” filters. In addition, if you have a favorite photographer, you can search their collections by just simply inputting their username on the search bar. The downside to Flickr is that there may be some photos on the website that are not for free, so you would need to filter those photos out by using the search bar and selecting the “any license” menu and clicking the “commercial use allowed” check box.
Pixabay
Pixabay is the website you should visit if you want to look for other image types aside from photographs, as it also has a collection of illustrations, videos, logos, and vector graphics. The website’s search bar also makes it easier to find the photo and the type of image you are looking for, as it has an “image type select” menu to the right of the bar that lets you select if you want to look for a vector graphic, illustration, or a video.
Moreover, Pixabay also has an advanced search option that lets you choose if the photo search results would show you landscape or portrait photos or photos taken by a specific camera model. If you want to look for the best of the best photos in terms of image quality, you can go to the Editor’s Choice page to see the most amazing photos curated by the Pixabay team.
Unsplash
Most amateur photographers upload their photos on Unsplash to make their work more known online, and because of this, almost all of the images that you will see on the website are captured or taken with the highest quality cameras. So, if you want to use a high quality image on your blog or website, you can visit Unsplash and search for the photos that perfectly complement your post or page.
The unique feature that Unsplash has is the Collections page, wherein you will be able to filter photos based on a specific theme, like “Christmas,” “Winter,” or “Summer.” You can use this Collections feature if your blog post or article has a topic that can be associated to certain themes.
Pexels
Pexels is sort of similar to Unsplash because it is also a place for photographers to upload their portfolio and let them be used by other for free, although Pexels is much more focused in providing the best service and features for photographers rather than the users looking for free photos. Pexels often hosts a variety of competitions for photographers, and these competitions often counts how many views and download each photographer gets in total for all of his or her photos. Because of these competitions, photographers are usually motivated to upload more photos on their Pexels portfolio, thus allowing the site’s database to expand.
In addition to the competitions, Pexels also feature a leaderboard wherein you can see the top rated and most viewed photographers on the website. If you want to look for the best photos, you can just use the leaderboard and select the photographers that are on top of the list.
Those are four of the best websites where you can find stock photos and download them for free. There are dozens of other websites that you can visit to get free stock photos, but if you want to get high quality photos that would work well on any blog or website, you can just stick to using the four mentioned above.