10 Places for stock photos
It’s no big secret … when it comes to blog posts, the posts that have pictures are much more interesting than those without.
A picture allows the reader to have a short break in between text and compliments the writing by giving the reader a nice, visual image. Pictures have the ability to tell a story that sometimes can’t be told with just words. But sometimes we don’t have the pictures we need to say what we want to say. That’s where stock photos are a gold mine.
There are several websites where you can find stock photos for free.
This website defines its interesting (albeit a bit morbid) name as, “a morgue file is a place to keep post production materials for use of reference, an inactive job file”.
Public Domain Photos boasts of having 5,000 free photos and 8,000 free cliparts to utilize by businesses and individuals alike.
This website is easy to navigate and has everything broken into different categories on the first page. It also has a search tab if you are looking for something specific, as well as high resolution pictures (1600 x 1200 or 3072 x 2048)
At Stock.xchng there are over 30,000 photographers contributing over 350,000 stock photos. With that many photos, you’re almost guaranteed to find what you’re looking for!
This website groups its photos into two different categories – you can download good quality stock photos for free, but for their highest quality photos there is a charge.
The photos here are license-specific, so you have to be sure to check the licensing terms before downloading them. You also are able to rate, tag, collect, and comment on their photos.
StockVault
StockVault has 27,000 free images to choose from and download. They define themselves as, “Stockvault’s sole purpose is to collect and archive medium and high resolution photographs that designers and students can share and use for their personal and non-commercial design work”.
OpenPhoto
OpenPhoto is another website that has all of their categories broken down in easy to use buttons on the first page of their website.
Woophy
Don’t let the name throw you off – it stands for “World of Photography”, as demonstrated by the first page of their website where there is a huge map. Their goal is, “to ultimately cover every inch of our world map with images that represent the world’s beauty and peculiarity from all different cultural perspectives”.
Unprofound
This website differentiates itself by grouping all of its photos by color rather than category. They also have a search engine, but they say it’s, “a half-assed search engine, but it’s not very complex. So keep it simple there”.
These are just a handful of websites that allow you to search and find quality photos for free. So the next time you need to add a little pizzazz to a blog post, check them out. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by just how much you can find!
Kate Croston is a freelance writer, holds a bachelors degree in Journalism and Mass Communication. She writes guest posts for different sites and loves contributing to high speed internet service related topics. Questions or comments can be sent to: katecroston.croston09 @ gmail.com.
Thanks very much for these! I always struggle to find interesting and relevant pictures when I’m editing articles for Fuel Your Writing, and seem to take longer than I have to to find them. These are really going to help, thanks!
:) I’m glad you found this useful, hopefully one (or all!) of these sites will be of some use to you in the future!!
Thank you for such a comprehensive list
You are welcome!
Thanks for the list — I’m always looking for free stock photos and hadn’t heard of many of these sites. I’ve been relying on Morgue File too much — their search accepts only one term!
I fell into the same trap with Morgue File which is what led me initially to seek out other sources – and the internet is FULL of sites to get stock photos from, which makes me a little sad I was solely relying on Morgue File for so long!
Excellent list, thanks for posting this. It is amazing to think that 10 years ago, most of us were paying upwards of $300 for each stock image. Royalty-free was a fad, nobody thought it would last. Oops!
We posted a very similar list on our blog yesterday, although our focus was on sources with low-cost (but not free) images. It just shows how many good image resources are out there.
Our focus is on church websites, but these resources can really help anyone with a blog or website. http://churchwebsites.org/where-to-find-good-inexpensive-stock-photos
Oh my gosh, I know! Seems like there are a lot of “fads” out there that people discount too soon! There really are just a wealth of websites out there that offer low-cost or free photos, which begs the question of why people are still paying high dollar for stock images.
Thanks great info
Thank you :) I hope you get some use out of the sites!
http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/ is a search engine for Flickr that searches through Creative Commons images with the options to select Commercial Use and Editing.
I use it a lot for my blog: http://ampli.com/
Thanks for the great article!
Thanks for the list!
Try also http://www.picdrome.com, a growing Public Domain picture collection, free of copyright. All items are free to download for personal and commercial use, without restriction and are available in high definition. New photos are added on a daily basis.
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