For web designers, graphic designers and online marketers, a good image asset is worth its weight in gold. It's a bit like taking a selfie on a great phone — the right raw material does half the work for you. High resolution matters, but what matters even more is that an image is copyright-free. There's no shortage of free stock photo sites out there, yet most of them bury (or skip) the licensing terms altogether — and an image with no clear licence is a headache waiting to happen.
So we've done the digging for you. Below are nine of the best free stock image libraries on the web: the photos are genuinely high quality, most are high-resolution, and they're ideal fuel for your next design or print project. Best of all — every one of them is free.
In no particular order, here are our picks.
1. Pixabay
Website: https://pixabay.com/
Pixabay shares royalty-free images and video. Everything is published under a licence that lets you use it safely — with no permission needed from the artist or photographer, even for commercial work. It's arguably the largest free image site in the world, with a huge, richly varied library. In fact Pixabay works as an aggregator, pulling together the best of many sources under one roof.
2. PicJumbo
Website: https://picjumbo.com/
PicJumbo offers images free for both personal and commercial use. The photo quality is excellent, which makes it a great fit for interface design and other projects.
3. Pexels
Website: https://www.pexels.com/
Pexels offers hundreds of thousands of free photos, with plenty of new high-resolution shots added every day. The images are either uploaded by Pexels users or hand-picked from other free sources, and every one is vetted for quality and properly licensed. Everything is neatly tagged, so searching for exactly what you need is quick and easy.
4. StockSnap
Website: https://stocksnap.io/
StockSnap knows that tracking down the right image for an ad or a print job eats up time — and can be downright frustrating. That's why it offers a library of beautiful, high-quality photos free for any purpose, commercial use included. Its tagging and category system helps you browse quickly and find exactly the right images.
5. Life of Pix
Website: https://www.lifeofpix.com/
Free, high-resolution photos with no copyright restrictions for personal or commercial use — and new images added every week. All the pictures are donated to the public domain. One caveat: bulk redistribution isn't allowed, so without written permission from Life of Pix, resellers may republish a maximum of 10 images. The whole collection is hand-crafted by Montreal's LEEROY Creative Agency and its network of photographers.
6. Burst
Website: https://burst.shopify.com/
Burst is a free image platform powered by Shopify. Its photographers are constantly shooting and uploading high-resolution, high-quality images, so you can nearly always find the perfect free photo. Burst's goal is to build the best free image library going, so new photos and fresh categories arrive all the time — and you'll find plenty of shots tuned to current trends in e-commerce and retail.
7. Kaboompics
Website: https://kaboompics.com/
Kaboompics draws more than 70,000 visitors a month from 209 countries. To date its images have been displayed over 6 million times and downloaded more than 4 million times; the same photos also live on other sites such as Pexels, generating another 2 million downloads. Kaboompics shots have appeared on the BBC, CNN, Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Yahoo, iSpot, BuzzFeed, HubSpot, The Huffington Post, Lifehacker and more.
8. SplitShire
Website: https://www.splitshire.com/
SplitShire grew out of a simple idea: to give a second life to photos that would otherwise be forgotten for lack of any practical use. Over a decade behind the camera, its founder amassed thousands of images, most of them gathering dust on old hard drives. So he began uploading his own work for anyone to download free — including for commercial use.
9. FreeStocks
Website: https://freestocks.org/
FreeStocks offers free images for both commercial and personal use — all completely legal. These aren't the tired, soulless free photos you dug up years ago; they're fresh, current and varied, which makes them just as suited to everyday use as to more complex, specialised design projects.
