For students, premium stock photo sites such as Shutterstock, iStock, and Adobe Stock can be an unavailable luxury. Here is a selection of FREE stock sites to give your design the perfect look.
Pexels vast, well-organised collection of free stock photos is one of the best on the internet. In addition, they have free stock video so Pexels is a favourite site for bloggers across the world
Commercial free collection of over 300,000 high-resolution images from more than 50,000 contributors. Unsplash doesn’t offer the volume of choice as some paid sites, but the photos are top-quality and thousands are added every day. You should find something to work with on Unsplash.
This site has a very large database of high-quality images. It’s somewhat more oriented towards business and marketing than Unsplash, which is often helpful for content marketers and bloggers. Another big advantage of Pixabay is that they also offer free vectors and illustrations.
Stockvault is another great source of free stock photos, wallpapers, and even textures. The collection is only about half the size of Unsplash but has a good search engine and is well-organised for browsing by category.
PicJumbo is now a thriving free stock photo community with a large selection of beautiful free photos. It also has the option to download the entire collection.
Besides having a huge collection of unique stock images, Pikwazard also offers a design wizard that allows you to make basic edits like adding text overlays before downloading. While the basics are free, they also have a paid version that's a full-feature online image editing tool. https://pikwizard.com
Rawpixel claims to have the most diverse collection of stock photos. They also offer a design wizard that allows you to make basic edits like adding text overlays before downloading. While the basics are free, they also have a paid version that's a full-feature online image editing tool.
More than just a simple stock photo collection, Reshot is a community with a mission. They aim to give emerging photographers a platform to share their creativity with those who need it. Their curated collections are extensive, stunning, and completely free.
Nearly all images on these free stock sites have a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means you can copy, adapt, or distribute the images — even for commercial purposes — without requiring author consent. In other words, do whatever you want with them!
Gratisography has something else going on. They pride themselves on being the “world’s quirkiest collection of high-resolution free stock images.” They excel at offering free photos that are unique and less “stocky” than what you see elsewhere. Only the most “interesting” submissions get curated on this site.
STOCKSNAP.IO
Stocksnap.io offers beautiful, high-quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of - including commercial usage - for free. No tricks, no gimmicks, no fine print; just dazzling images for your creative projects.
CANVA
Choose from millions of highly curated free and premium stock photos. This site has tons of photos that are categorized into almost anything you can think of. The millions of high-quality photos give you the option to create beautiful designs.
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