13 stock photo websites you must know

Unsplash

Unsplash was started as a side-project from the makers of Crew when they could not find good quality pictures for their marketing website. Now it has grown to a place where photographers can contribute by sharing their own work while giving the designers a way to find the right photos. It is fast becoming a community for photographers, collectors, designers, curators. All images are licensed under CC0.

Pexels

Pexel is a place to find images and videos available for free under the creative commons cc0 license. Pexels daily adds 100 photos to its collection. All photos are handpicked, well tagged and our either from the photographers or from sources like Unsplash, gratisography, little visuals. Pexels is easy to use and has a great set of filters for its search.

Pixabay

A good place to search for images, vectors, videos & illustrations with close to 800,000 assets. All images are free and available for re-use under CC0. They have a WordPress plugin and also an API for easy integration.

Negative Space

For finding images that are minimal in their content and feature clean shots, Negative Space is a good resource. All images are high-resolution and licensed under the CC0 license. This means all of them are free for reuse on personal and commercial projects without any attribution necessary. They are also organized into photo collections, like User Experience, Wireframe, Code, Retro, Sea, etc., to make it easier to sift through them.

ISO Republic

ISO Republic has over 3,000 CC0 licensed pictures with more added almost every week. They also have a dedicated food and drink collection called Foodie Factor, which features over 1,200 high-resolution images.

Stock Snap

Searchable resource for Royalty-free stock pictures under CC0 license. The photos are added daily and also link back to the photographer’s profiles. They have a weekly newsletter which you can sign up for regular updates. It was started by the folks at Snappa, a cloud-based graphic editor for bloggers and marketers.

Visual Hunt

Visual hunt hunts for the best free images from different online sources and pulls them together. Most images are CC0 license, but not all. Cross-check the license to ensure the correct attribution is required. The site lets you download images in different resolutions.

Stock Up

Another search engine for stock photos aggregates across different stock photo sources. Read the license associated with the images that appear. All pictures are not just under the creative commons zero licenses, there are a few under the public domain as well.

LibreStock

Librestock is a meta-search engine for cc0 license images. It searches through 47 stock websites including pixabay.com, pexels.com. It links back to the original site from where the image was found. Search filters are based on tags and websites where it searches from, not based on colors or any other features.

Pikwizard

Pikwizard is a free images library with some great images under the Creative Commons license. No attribution is necessary for using the images on Pikwizard. It also gives users the option to edit images in the Design Wizard, an online graphic design software.

Mediachain

Mediachain attribution engine is a search engine for free, high-quality images available for re-use and share. The images listed are the Creative Commons images from across the web, with automatic attribution for the creators. The attribution engine is meant to help creators connect with audiences where their media is shared. You can also upload an image to find its creator or find similar images where the creator can be appropriately attributed. Since the images are not tagged within the app, the search results are not best.

Adobe Stock

Adobe Stock is a good place to not only for stock images but icons, graphics, videos also. It’s not free though. You can pay per image at $9.99 or pay per month for different numbers of downloads. It integrates directly with the Adobe Creative Cloud apps.

Coverr

It really is a source for videos only for cover pages but essentially they could be used for anything. There is no search, so it is hard to browse through the limited categories provided. But, a great place to find video clips for your next marketing project.

So next time you are hunting for an image, use one of the search engines for a royalty-free image. What are your favorite places to hunt for stock assets? Share in the comments below.