If you have been Googling images and using them on your marketing material, you may be breaking the law. Maybe not ‘Breaking Bad’ level breaking the law, but still, nobody wants to find their goofy Insta post picture adorning someone else’s blog post. So please be considerate and follow both the laws AND the rules of common etiquette when using photos, pictures, or artwork that you didn’t create. As of September 2018, Google now provides links to image creator, credit and copyright notice metadata, whenever available for images on Google Images. For more information, see their blog post Image Rights Metadata in Google Images.
The good news is that there are plenty of websites that provide beautiful stock photography. Many of these sites provide images that are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under creative commons public domain dedication however, some may require attribution which is easy enough to do and will be explained on the site you choose to use.
Well now that that’s out of the way, here are 10 free image resources for you to use instead.
1. Pexels
Pexels provides a hand-picked selection of photos uploaded by users or sourced from free image websites, they are high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under their own Pexels license.
2. Unsplash
Unsplash provides beautiful, free photos uploaded by their community of photographers. Their images have been used in everything from Apple keynotes to a default theme shipped with WordPress.
3. Styled Stock
If you are looking for femininely styled images then Styled Stock is for you – their collection includes clean and fresh images of beauty, desktops, fashion, florals and food
4. StockSnap
StockSnap exists to offer beautiful, high quality stock photos and promise their users an ever-expanding collection of the best, most beautiful stock images for free.
5. Kaboom Pics
Every day new photos of the highest quality are added to Kaboompics for use on your blog posts, graphics for your social media accounts or to make your website more appealing – all for free.
6. Reshot
Reshot provides images from the world’s best emerging photographers, handpicked, non-stocky images to use as you wish to elevate your creative projects.
7. Pixabay
Pixabay has a huge collection of over 1 million+ high quality stock images and videos shared by their community of creatives, sharing copyright free images and videos. All content is released under their Pixabay License.
8. Foodiesfeed
Food photographers from all around the world share their photos to Foodiesfeed, with the objective of ugly sterile stock photos in the online space related to food.
9. Freestocks.org
Freestocks.org supplies images that are not clichéd worn-out stock images but rather images that are fresh, up-to-date and versatile in style, for everyday use as well as more complex and specific projects.
10. MMT
Launched in 2014 to share their love of photography with the world, MMT, has taken countless photos and videos and shared them for free to give back to the online community.
I hope you’ll find these resources helpful. If you know of any other free resources let me know and I’ll add them to the list.