If content is King, then What is Queen? No matter how great the content is, it won’t distribute itself.
According to Copyblogger’s Senior Editor Sonia Simone, “Content needs vehicles for people to pass it along, discuss its merits, argue over its controversies, blog it, mash it, tweet it, and even scrape it.”
“Content is king, but marketing is queen, and runs the household.” Gary Vaynerchuk
Apart from focusing on giving high-quality contents, I allocate over 60% of my time on digital marketing too – Instagram, Pinterest, Slideshare, Facebook, infographic, ebooks, blogging, magazine apps etc… One of main challenges in doing this is finding the right and High-resolution images. The key in making the Queen presentable is Good Images.
“Good design goes to heaven, bad design goes everywhere.” Mieke Gerritzen
Though I can afford, I won’t spend my entire budget in hiring professional designer or buying any images if I can find High-quality images for FREE! Yes, I do have a graphic designer for my magazine apps. But for social media posts, especially in Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook, I will go to my favorite TOP 10 sites, where you can get good quality for personal and commercial use, without any attribution. Thanks to the generous communities in contributing their own images.
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Best Stock Photo Websites for Royalty-Free Images
Canva has long been a personal favorite of mine – offering millions of high quality free and premium stock photos for personal and commercial use, without any attribution.
Plus, Canva just makes design amazingly simple for anyone.
With the great selection of text, graphics and template layouts & easy-to-use drag and drop tools, you can create beautiful design for free on Canva.
Tip: Follow these simple guides to create your customized Instagram Stories images and Instagram Highlight cover with Canva.
It has over 100 million beautiful photos for almost every category that you can think of, from sport and health to from beauty and fashion to travel and business.
Everyone starts for free, you can use it for personal and commercial purposes, no attribution required. You’ll need to create an account before you start using it, but it is free to do so.
Stock Unlimited is one of my favorite stock photo websites.
There are over 1+ million visuals in the library and growing. This includes high-quality photos, images, audios, vectors, templates, illustrations, infographics, icons, and clipart.
On top of that, they add 3000+ new free content to their collection every month, keeping the library fresh and ensuring you always have access to the latest designs.
Affordable and yet have an extensive graphics library.
Vecteezy is the best way to discover and purchase high-quality stock images and videos.
With Vecteezy, you’ve got access to millions of beautiful photos, vectors and videos that are free to use however you please: show off your social media content, liven up your blog posts, or spice up your project and marketing images. It’s totally amazing.
What’s great, Vecteezy offers legal indemnification with the free content, so you can use stock images for your commercial projects with confidence.
However, you need to attribute Vecteezy in your work. If you want to access their best content with no attribution, you can either join Pro for only $9/mo or pay as you go for the images you use.
There are over 1.2 million photos, illustration, vector graphic and videos that you can use. Free for personal and commercial use. No attribution required.
This site is my top pick, most of the time I can find what I want in one stop, from beautiful landscape to images with emotions.
6. Pexels
All the photos on Pexels are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which means you can use these photos for any legal purpose, even for commercial use. You don’t have to ask for permission, and setting any link back to the image source is not required.
With Unsplash you can download 10 new “do whatever you want” High-resolution free stock photos every 10 days. You can even modify, copy and distribute the photos without asking for permission or attribution.
Stocksnap houses a wealth of free images—categorized and searchable. Just type in the keyword search or browse by categories for some fresh ideas.
There are hundreds of high-quality and high-resolution images added weekly. You have the freedom to use all of the images.
Gratisography is another great website serving up high-resolution photos covered under the Creative Commons Zero license. New Hi-resolution photos are added every week.
This awesome project is created by Ryan McGuire, a multifaceted whimsically creative visual artist, based in Grinnell. If you’re looking for slightly eclectic images, this is the site you should go.
Karolina, a photographer and a graphic designer from Poland, creates Kaboompics with the mission to help you visualize your world, your business and your ideas for life. There are over 4millions user visits the site.
Some of the Kaboompics photos even appear on sites like CNN, Forbes, Yahoo, The Huffington Post, BBC and more. It’s one of the most popular free stock images that you won’t want to miss.
11. Picjumbo (Free)
Viktor Hanacek, 22-year-old online entrepreneur and photographer from Czech Republic is the creative eye behind this amazing site for free high-quality images.
He has an inspiring journey of how he started this Free stock images site. After being rejected by all the stock photos sites due to his “insufficient” quality images, he decided to create his own website, and so the Picjumbo was created.
“As a web designer I know every designer needs high quality photos in full resolution. That’s why I created picjumbo.” Viktor Hanacek
ISO Reublic is one of the best free stock image site, which makes it easy to search any images via category. Just select the category to make a more relevant search. You can sign up the email list to get the latest photos straight to your inbox.
Morgue File is another amazing site to get high-quality images. There are over 350,000 free stock images for commercial use. It’s easy to navigate and very user-friendly.
All photos on Negative Space are free to use without copy restrictions. You can do some easy search via category, from animal to technology, basically, you can find the right images for any project in one stop. To get the latest beautiful images directly to your inbox, just enter your email to their subscription box.
You can use all the free images on Rawpixel for any legal purpose, even for commercial use. They’re licensed under the Creative Common Zero licenses.
16. Pikwizard (Free)
Pikwizard offers over 100,000++ completely free high-quality stock images, including 20,000 exclusive images. More beautiful and high-resolution images are added to the library on a daily basis.
You can use those images for both personal and commercial purposes; they are covered under Creative Commons Zero license.
Tip: Create a free account Pikwizard, so you can edit the images directly with their built-in design tool called Design Wizard. I like the many ready-made templates which I can use to create unique blog images and social media posts!
Conclusion
As a lean startup, I love sharing more tips and strategies on how to jumpstart your online business from scratch.
Have you checked out How I grow my Instagram to 5000followes in 5 months yet?
Which is your favorite site to get high-quality images?
Do you have any favorite free stock image sites that I didn’t mention in this post? Do share with us in the comment below. I am constantly updating this list with new Free stock images sites (that why the number doesn’t match the graphics).
And lastly, if you liked this post, don’t forget to share it on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in December 2017 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness