Pexels offers free high resolution photography and videos. It has a really nice, simple search engine and the majority of licences are creative commons based ensuring that you can use them across the web (including here on Medium).
Simplar to Pexels, Unsplash is a entirely free service, with creative commons image. You can use Unsplash for Commercial usage a slight difference is that there is no direct requirement for attribution, though it is appreciated.
Pixabay, as with Pexels and Unsplash uses creative commons and like Unsplash doesn't require attribution. Though as always this is nice as it is a free service and it helps such a serice surive.
Pixabay offers illustrations, vectors and music - as well as photos and videos.ISO Republic, again an entirely creative commons based, high resolution offering adds to its offering with some great filtering across it's creative and has a large number of collections.
Whilst not CC0, it may as well be as the licence offered by MorgueFile offeres you all the same rights. The selection here isn't quite as large as in other locations in my experience, but it is different and you tend to find images that are not in other locations (are unique).
This makes it really worthwhile and it's certainly a stock photo website not on most peoples list.
This site is a little more complex, with media allowing non-commercial, commerical or CC0 use. Again like others there is a wide array of media not found else where and a great selection of collections, it's just worth being careful over what licence is on each type.
As I wrote wrote the introduction to the above a friend of mine popped into my mind, he's a professional photographer. I recalled a conversation we had about why professional photographers are so important and why they can never be replaced.
We live in a world where we all have a fantastic camera in our pocket, right? The latest iPhone or Android ... ?
Well errr yeh, if you want some dodgy photo that will be at a wonky angle, be blurry, out of focus, saturated in some manner or have all manner of other errors - not to mention that the person taking it is unlikely to have a clue when it comes to framing.
It's this last idea which brings me neatly to why stock photography and professional photography will have a place for sometime to come.
With professional photography a business or author is able to go further, getting the exact vision they want (vs a half ass vision from stock photos), getting something new (vs something likely on another site), getting the ideal picture (vs just good enough), and getting an immediate positive personal connection (vs "yeh thats ok, pal") - the down side for business and why stock photos have their place is the cost.
Whilst yes, across stock photography there will be some dodgy stock photos (with blur or lack of composition), if the author/editor of an article picks a great photo it can showcase that article and attract a wider audience than otherwise.
It's ultimately a trade off, and professional photography should win - but quick free stock photography wins when quantity is required over quality.
What guides business seems to be when quanity is required (articles) stock will do, for real website photos (quality) then professional is best.
What do you think?
