Your website, blogs and marketing will look far more interesting, accessible and attractive with great pictures and photos. But they can be costly if you need several to get the message across.
The good news is that there are some fabulous places where you can get free picture images and as long as you follow the individual guidelines of each website you can use them to your heart’s content. Here are some of our favourites:
Free Digital Photos
This website offers thousands of stock photos that are pretty well categorised. You can use the smallest images at no cost if you agree to attribute the creator of the image with a hyperlink to their website. Otherwise you can pay a small fee per image to get a larger version or to avoid the need to attribute.
Free Stock Photos
On Free Stock Photos you have a large selection of public domain images and creative commons images which you can use at no charge. Each image may have slightly different rules for usage. Rules range from free general use to needing to attribute the artist so make sure you scroll down on each image to find out what is required.
Stock Xchng
Stock Xchng offers a comprehensive selection of images that you can use. The search is a little confusing at first as they add paid images above and below the free images in the search results. However if the free images are your thing there are plenty to choose from.
Every Stock Photo
Every Stock Photo aggregates free stock images from many different sources and as such has millions of images on display. It is a great one stop shop for searching and once you find an image you like link back to the source website for downloads.
Vector Vaco
Vector Vaco is a great source of free vector images. Vector images can be much more expensive than photographic images so it is well worth some research to see if you can find what you are looking for on this website.
Clker
Clker is one of Mel’s favourite sites for clip art and vectors. The images are public domain and uploaded by a community of graphic artists.
morgueFile
morgueFile is a public image archive of free images for creative work. Use and alter the images in your design process, and upload your own images to the pool as you go.
There you have it! 7 great resources for images that you can use to beautify your website absolutely free! Remember to abide by the attribution requirements or restrictions that vary from site to site and image to image and everyone is happy!
I am sure there are plenty of other places where you can get free images, so if you have any goodies please list them below!
Happy Hunting!
Serena Star Leonard