Adding images to your blog or social media will help you to attract more readers (and hopefully followers), however, it’s not always easy to find high quality, royalty free images, and sourcing them at a cost can quickly get pricey.

Thankfully, in recent years, there has been a growing number of websites providing high-quality stock images appearing all over the web. And the best thing is, they’re free!

In this post, we’ve constructed a list of our favorite, free-to-use websites for sourcing stock images for your blog and social media posts.

1. Unsplash

Unsplash offers 10 new high-quality photos every 10 days via an email subscription and on their website. It has its own license so you can use the images for free, in any way you like, except for using them to create a competing website, and you don’t have to provide attribution to the photographer or Unsplash (even though it’s nice to).

2. Pexels

Pexels also has its own license, which states what you can and cannot do with the images. You can modify and use the images for free for both personal and commercial use without attribution. The site provides a huge collection of high quality and completely free stock photos that have been selected from a variety of free image sources to ensure that you’re getting only the best images.

3. Burst

Burst is a free stock photo platform for entrepreneurs by Shopify. The images are both free and royalty-free.

4. Free Images

Free Images provides free stock images under its own license. The license allows a very broad range of uses, though it does list several restricted use cases (which is quite a common theme for most free images sites).

5. Canva

Canva is an online graphic design tool that also offers free stock photos. One advantage of using Canva is that you can quickly turn an image into a custom graphic to use on social media or your blog.

6. Pixabay

Pixabay is a huge database of over 1.6 million free public domain images and videos for both personal and commercial use. Images on Pixabay are licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which means you can use the images without asking for permission or giving credit to the photographer.

7. Death to Stock

A handy resource for collecting unusual images for blog posts and social media. Unlike most websites mentioned, Death to Stock doesn’t have a gallery of images. It sends you 20 new photos every month when you sign up for its newsletter. Death to stock photo uses their own license which is available to read on their website. While not technically free, there is a free 14 day trial you can sign up for.

8. New Old Stock

New Old Stock is a collection of vintage photos from the public archives, free of known copyright restrictions. Although the website states “If you are curious of whether or not you can use it, check the institution’s rights statement through the link I provide to the original Flickr posting. Most prefer that you link back to the original Flickr photo and mention the institution by name”.

9. Life of Pix

Life of Pix is a collection of free high-resolution stock images donated to the public domain by the Leeroy Advertising Agency in Montreal With no copyright restrictions, the beautiful photos are free for personal and commercial use.

10. Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting platform where you can find images that can be used and modified for commercial purposes. Select “Commercial use & mods allowed” under the “Any license” filter to find those images, and remember to check the license for each image as they vary.

Although we have tried our best to list the usage restrictions of each website where possible, these will quickly become outdated, so it’s crucial that you ensure you check the websites’ most recent copyright restrictions to ensure you are using the images correctly.

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