Regardless of your preferred digital medium, high-quality images are a must to generate more clicks. This stems from the fact that the human brain functions in images and processes knowledge 60,000 times faster when shown the information visually. The question though is how to find images for use on your blog or website.
If you are a big corporation, you can afford to buy images. However, if you are an entry-level blogger, then this becomes too expensive, and what you need is images that are not copyright restricted and royalty-free. Royalty-free means to use someone's intellectual property without having to pay royalty, capital or any sort of license fee. Luckily, there are several resources that can help you there.
Before we start, it's a good idea to go through the different terms and licenses that you need to make yourself familiar with before using pictures off of a site:
i. Creative Commons - These images can be used for free since the artist has lifted their rights from their work. But always check the terms and conditions prior to using any images that fall under this category.
ii. Public Domain - Any image created in the United States of America before 1923 falls under this category and can be distributed, used, modified without permission.
iii. Attribution - Attribution is giving credits to the respective owner of the image.
iv. Commercial Use - Whether you will be making money from the activity or site that you are using the images on.
v. Membership - Some sites might ask you to sign up before using their royalty-free images. The site may charge you for their membership plan.
Following are 10 amazing sites for royalty-free images
StockSnap.io website uses very skillful features which makes it very easy for the users to browse through the various images available. They also have a very large selection of amazing free stock images of high resolution. As an addition, the website also keeps the record of the downloads and views so one can find the most beautiful and trending images available.
StockSnap.io uploads hundreds of images on a regular basis which are released under Creative Commons public domain-no attribution required.
Pexels provides high-quality photos that are nicely tagged and are searchable. They have a great collection of completely free stock images licensed under the Creative Common Zone (CCZ) license which makes the website quite reliable for the users. All photos on Pexels can be discovered easily through their discovery pages.
Unsplash has gradually become one of the most supreme sources of stock high-resolution images. The core team of Unsplash releases all of the pictures for free for its users. The team also goes through the users' new submissions and presents the best of photos on their homepage.
Burst is one of the resources from Shopify providing a great number of free stock images for entrepreneurs around the globe. In the large collection of photos that Burst owns and presents, some images come under Creative Commons CCO while the rest fall under Shopify's private photo license. Burst was meant to launch for entrepreneurs, to help them to make better websites, products, presentations and marketing campaigns.
Burst's collection of photos contains authentic hand-clicked images that were taken in-house and with the theme that revolves around trending business niches- everything from DIY beard oil to Aliexpress LED sneakers.
Reshot is said to be a massive library of handpicked free stock images that wouldn't be found elsewhere. Reshot was created for entrepreneurs, startups, freelancers and artists who are sick of tacky stock images. Reshot is free to access with no attribution required.
Pixabay offers an enormous collection of costless stock images, vectors and art illustrations of which all images are released under CCO. It is one of the largest collections on the internet with some pretty amazing photos across all themes.
Gratisography provides free high-quality photos that can be used for your private and commercial assignments. A good number of amazing pictures are uploaded on a weekly basis which are free of copyright restrictions. All the pictures in Gratisography are captured by Ryan McGuire of Bells Design.
Picjumbo has a collection of completely free images for personal and commercial uses. New authentic beautiful images are uploaded daily with a wide variety of categories which include fashion, food, adventure, nature, abstract, technology and whatnot.
They offer a vast range of high-resolution quality free stock images that include city, architecture, abstract, fashion, lifestyle, food, landscapes and more. Photos from Kaboom pics can be used for personal and commercial purposes.
Little Visuals began life as a passion project of Nic Jackson. He recently passed away but his photos obviously didn't. All the images that have been posted remain in his memory which afterward, were presented and released under CCO license public domain dedication.
It is always better to pick your images responsibly and site or credit the artist wherever needed. An important thing to remember is that though you can use the photos on the websites above for your project or app, however, you can't distribute or sell the images.
We hope this article helped you find great free images for use on your blog or app. We would love to hear your feedback in the comments sections below.
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