Best Free Stock Images

Often times you’ll have to create a mockup of your design plan, or a demo website to showcase your final web design project. For this you’ll also most likely need stock photos. If you opt for a premium pics, pricing can range from $1-10 each (more if you want a redistribution license) or a couple hundred a month for a set number of downloads per day. This can get very expensive.

To save a few bucks you could always use free photos, but the problem here is finding high quality images that still look professional. Well no worries – I did the heavy lifting for you. Below are some of the best, high quality, high resolution and of course FREE stock photos on the web. Enjoy!

Unsplash

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Unsplash is one of the best free stock photo sites on the internet. They add 10 brand new stock photos each and every week, and they are awesome. Most are massive, hi-res, cover a variety of categories and are all completely free for commercial use. Go for it – use them for whatever you want. Your creative works will have never looked better.

Visit Unsplash

picjumbo

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picjumbo is the creation of Viktor Hanacek. He sells premium photo packs over on Creative Market, as well as offers a premium picjumbo account if you love what you see. Viktor images are all fantastic, and are mostly lifestyle and nature pics. They look great in portfolios, blogs and really any web design – so make sure you checkout his work!

Visit picjumbo

Pixabay

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Pixabay is another great resource. They offer hundreds of thousands of free images, each with multiple download sizes. Although, to download the largest size you will have to sign up for a free account. I actually recommend you get the free account anyway – this way you don’t have to enter captchas every time you download a pic. Pixabay constantly has new images added by users on a daily basis. The best part about Pixabay (other than it being free of course) is that you can filter your image search results by type (photo, clipart or vector), category and orientation (landscape or portrait) as well as sort by recent or popular. Just give it a try – I’m positive you’ll find many images you can’t wait to use.

Visit Pixabay

Death To The Stock Photo

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Death to the Stock Photo is a relatively new site that sends you a zip file of high resolution lifestyle photos each and every month. You have to sign up for their mailing list to get the photos, but they sent right to your inbox each and every month so you never forget to download them. A great part about Death to the Stock Photo is that each photo set you receive has a theme making them perfect for creating portfolios and images galleries for your web designs.

Visit Death To The Stock Photo

stock.xchng

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Stock.xchng is a massive library of free stock images. There are tons of photos. Seriously. Just search a term, any term, and you’re almost guaranteed lots of results. Users share their photography for free – so there are lots of high quality images ripe for the picking. Yes, you will have to look through the images a bit. But there are lots of great images waiting for you (or you could peruse the “most downloaded” items, since those are generally popular for a reason).

Visit stock.xchng

morgueFile

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MorgueFile is a collection of free-to-use stock photos uploaded (and then downloaded) by users. Just head over to the Free Files page and sort by popular. This images are just as nice (if not better) than many stock photos available for sale. And once you’ve found an image you love, make sure to checkout the rest of that photographer’s portfolio. Often times they’ll have lots more quality free photos for your to pick from.

Visit morgueFile

Other awesome stock photo options include Dribbble and Flickr Creative Commons – but when using either of these sites you must be sure to contact the image author to ask for permission to use their work, and if it is a creative commons photo triple check the photo license terms. There are lots more stock sites, but I really haven’t found much value in them. If i have to spend hours sifting through low quality images it’s just not worth it to me.

That wraps up my list! These are the free stock photos I typically turn to, but if you can think of any others please let me know in the comments below!

 

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About The Author
Kyla

Hi! I'm Kyla, and I'm here to share some of the latest and greatest news, tips, tutorials and inspiration for design that I find on the web. I hope you enjoy!