Save & Share this List of Top 20 Free Stock Image Sites for Your Digital Content Marketing!
On a tight budget or worried about copyright issues when using images found online?
Using Google Images and find and copy images can get you in trouble, unless you get permission from the original source or buy a license to use it.
The best way to ensure you have the proper right to use an image is either to purchase it at a stock photo site. We use Shutterstock.com or PhotoDune.net or to use an open source photo site.
Below is a list of marketing technologists’ favorites for free public domain stock photography:
- Wikimedia Commons Search – Over 17 million freely usable media files that you can use! Some photos might require attribution. Check each file individually to see if any restrictions apply.
- Flickr Creative Commons Search – This is a great place to search for photos but you need to read the licenses for each image to see what it can be used in legally.
- The Stock.XCHNG – One of the oldest and well known resources for free stock photos. Most do not require any sort of attribution.
- Morgue File – A classic resource for browsing high resolution stock photos for your digital content marketing. All are totally free for personal or corporate use.
- Pixabay – Find high quality stock photos to use for any purpose, no need to include any type of attribution!
- Open Stock Photography – A vast collection of free photos released under wikimedia creative commons licensing. There are basically no restrictions on how you can use the images!
- Stock Photos for Free – Check out the 100,000+ images available for download from all around the world. Enjoy a royalty free license for all types of media, including commercial.
- Public Domain Photos – More than 5,000 free photos and 8,000 free clip-art files that can be displayed in both personal and commercial designs.
- Free Digital Photos – Download free and premium stock photos and illustrations for websites, advertising materials, newspapers, magazines, e-books, book covers and pages, music artwork, software applications and much more.
- Free Media Goo – A very nice collection of royalty free photos, textures and digital background images for use in print, web, TV and more.
- Public Domain Pictures – another nice repository of free public domain images. Most are free for commercial use.
- USA Government Public Domain Photo Index – this is a great place to find images from the United States government. Most of the images will be either public domain or US government works (which can be used without permission or fee).
- Free Pixels – Over 5000 free stock photos and images that can mostly be used for commercial purposes.
- Open Clipart – A very nice collection of public domain clip-art images you can use.
- Every Stock Photo – A search engine for free photos. Not all are free for commercial use. You need to read the individual license on each photo before using.
- Free Range Stock – a nice collection of high resolution photos submitted by photographers that can be used in commercial projects.
- Pixel Perfect Digital – A huge collection of images released under creative commons that can be used for any sort of work (some attribution may be required).
- FreeStockPhotos.com – has been a provider of free photography for personal or commercial use since 1999.
- Historical Stock Photos – this is a great place to find old public domain photos of historical figures.
- Creative Commons Photo Search Tool – this is an incredibly easy way to search for open source images from all of the web’s top resources (Google, Flickr, Wikipedia, etc.)
