We’ve posted before about how important photography is for your website. And we’ve increasingly received requests to design and develop frameworks that accommodate heavy imagery (for example, check out our work with Flickr and InsideClimate News).
But oftentimes, great quality photos can either be very expensive to purchase or incredibly time consuming to produce. So we increasingly recommend a number of free stock photo resources readily accessible online (this post’s featured image was pulled from one our favorites listed below).
But there are so many out there!
Not sure where to start? That’s okay – we’ve put together some of our favorites for you to reference next time you need a great photo, fast. Almost all of these are free, but a few require a small per photo fee. Some are whimsical and urban, others are brooding and outdoorsy. They cover a whole range of styles really.
Choose whichever resource(s) best fit your brand and goals. Just make sure you do a bit of research and double check whether the photo is approved for commercial use, has fine print in a custom license, requires attribution, or has any other stipulations before you use it.
Our List
- Death to the Stock Photo
- Getrefe
- Gratisography
- IM Free
- IOS Republic
- Jay Mantri
- Life of Pix
- Pexels
- PicJumbo
- Picography
- PhotoDune
- Photocrops
- Public Domain Archive
- Magdeleine
- Negative Space
- New Old Stock
- Raumrot
- Scatter Jar
- Snapwire Snaps
- Splitshire
- StockSnap
- Tookapic
- Unsplash
- Visual Hunt
- Women of Color in Tech
Bonus
Make sure and check out this impressive list on Github by Tony Phipps too. He organizes these and other resources by license (helpful if you’re searching for just CC0-licensed photos). This repository is also a great place to find videos, illustrations, icons and patterns.
Contribute
Did we leave some of your favorite resources out? Comment below with anything we might have missed!
