Let’s be honest, quality stock photos can be an expensive venture, we’ve found this especially true when needing them for websites or blog posts, where the cost can (sometimes) outway the necessity to have them.

There are free stock websites available where you can find quality images to use, but then you have to contend with if they can be used commercially or only personally, whether attribution is needed as well as other headaches.

So we thought we’d compile a list of places (that we use) where you can find free stock photos, and unlike other stock photo lists though, these websites use the ‘creative commons license’.

This means that you can use the images however and where you want for free, with no attribution needed (though they appreciate it if you do).

And because we find that there isn’t a single free stock photo website that covers everything you want, we’ve created a list of 13 free stock photo websites, where you can use the photos as you want…..you know, bar re-creating a competing website or selling the images to others.

(All images shown here, are stockphotos taken from the corresponding websites).

Unsplash

As the website proudly claims on its about page, it has over 300,000 free (do whatever you want) photos available that have been shared by their generous community of photographers. There are thousands of photos added each day and this is one of the first stops we head to when looking for high quality photography.

Stocksnap

This one I personally use a lot for our blogs (the majority of the header photos will have from there). They say that there are ‘Hundreds of high resolution images added weekly and the search bar really helps you filter down to the sorts of images you want.

Pixabay

Founded in 2010, Pixabay has a wide range of quality (and admittedly, some not so great) images on here. You’ll need to sign up for a free account if you want any photos over 1920px, but for anything under that, there’s plenty to choose from.

Life of Pix

Made by Leeroy advertising agency in Montreal, there’s a nice range of high resolution photography here to use. As an added bonus too, they also have a sister video website called Life of Vids you can check out too.

Designers Pics

There are a quality range of images, taken by Jeshu John to provide free photography to those in need, with new images being added every month, with a range of image categories to choose from, all the way from architecture to wild life.

Picjumbo

Created by designer & photographer Viktor Hanacek in 2013, he started the website when his photos were rejected for “lack of quality” by all the other stock photo websites. Well we believe the photos here speak for themselves in terms of quality. They do have a premium membership as well that will open up more photos as well,but this doesn’t take away from the range of quality, free photos available.

Split Shire

Not the biggest of stock photos websites, with there being just shy of a thousand at this time, however some of the photos have found their way onto the likes of The Huffington Post, CNN, Book Covers, Magazines and thousands of websites/blogs.

Skitter Photo

Launched in 2014 by a couple of amatuer photographers from the Netherlands, Skitterphoto is now a vast library of quality images of various themes, including landscape, people, technology, as well as more.

Foter

Foter, on its homepage boasts a whopping ‘335 Million Premium Royalty-Free Stock Photos From The Foter Community’. That’s a huge range to choose from with categories including buildings, fashion, food to name a few.

Stokpic

Started in August 2014, it started off as a culmination of over 12 years of photography ‘filling hard drives’, when he realised that most of these photos were never going to be seen. So he set up a website to share them for free, which have been used by people around the globe.

Freerange Stock

This free stock photo website claims to only have ‘either artistically and photographically interesting’ images, so they only add images that they feel are appealing, from their own in-house photographers or from their community. You do have to create an account to download the photos.

Libreshot

A stock photo website from an SEO and marketing consultant who love’s photography. As well as a range of categories to choose from, each photo has a rating, letting you see/filter by the most popular images on there.

Pexels

Over 40,000 free stock photos, the website was set up to

“help millions of designers, writers, artists, programmers and other creators to get access to beautiful photos”

They have a huge range available that covers a range of different categories including those for designers, office life, for the creative process and more.

Hopefully this will give you a few ideas and places you can look for completely free photos to use for your website 🙂