Stock photos have a variety of uses, not only for personal branding and educational purposes but also for creative business design and marketing campaigns.
When you work in advertising, developing cohesive marketing materials should be your top priority to reinforce your branding in every design you create.
What are the best sites for finding free stock photos? We have the top sites that will make it easier to create better visuals for your marketing materials.
Level up your marketing design with Venngage for business. Venngage offers a powerful design solution for professionals and marketers without design experience.
Click to jump ahead:
- Venngage
- Pixabay
- Pexels
- Freepik
- Unsplash
- Pikwizard
- Gratisography
- Reshot
- Picjumbo
- Stockvault
- Morguefile
- Adobe Stock
What are the best free stock photo websites?
A myriad of marketing collaterals and visual presentation photos in their design emanates a compelling and credible overtone.
Photos aren’t the only visuals you will find from stock imagery websites. These sites include a gallery of stock photos alongside vectors in the form of illustrations, soundtracks, video footage, 3D models, and even editable templates for printed collaterals.
If you’re looking for high-quality yet affordable free images for your designs, read on for a list of the best free stock photo websites.
Venngage
Venngage is a comprehensive design solution that offers templates and some of the best free stock photos for a variety of marketing and business uses.
Among the many design features on offer, Venngage also has a library of over 3 million stock photos. With these images, you can create attractive visuals like the poster below, which you can design using the Venngage Poster Maker.
Venngage has integrations with Pexels and Pixabay, both of which are included on this list. But you can access all the free images that the two sites have to offer from the Venngage editor.
Among the free stock images on offer are thousands of diverse images so brands can create marketing materials that appeal to a wider audience.
To add a stock photo to your design, go to the Photos tab in the sidebar. Search for the type of photo you want to use and pick the best choice for your design.
If you choose a template that already includes stock photos, you can double-click the image and replace it from the popup menu that appears.
With Venngage for business, you can customize the professional templates and visuals using stock photos and download your templates in a variety of formats.
Formats available include PNG, PNG HD, PDF, interactive PDFs, as well as PowerPoint. Newsletters can be downloaded in HTML format for Mailchimp and other email clients.
The Venngage blog is a rich resource for design inspiration and tips. Learn about incorporating stock photos in designs, creating infographics, the new Smart diagrams Venngage has to offer, and much more.
Features
Top Qualities: 3 million royalty-free images; access to 10,000+ templates for infographics, brochures, posters, reports, and more
Ease of Use: 9.7/10
Quality of Support: 9.7/10
Ease of Setup: 9.7/10
Pixabay
One of the top stock photo websites is Pixabay. It is known for its extensive library of high-quality free stock photos, vectors, and illustrations. The site has over a million public domain images to date.
Although Pixabay’s images can be used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, many businesses prefer this site because it caters to marketers and entrepreneurs. This is evident through its business and marketing-oriented visual content.
Pixabay recently started including songs, video clips, and sound effects in its gallery, which has been a boon for graphic designers.
When using Pixabay images, no attribution is required, even for commercial use. All the featured photos, illustrations, and other graphics on the site are released under Creative Commons CC0.
Ratings
Top Qualities: Large collection of free stock images, along with illustrations
Ease of Use: 9.4/10
Quality of Support: 8.7/10
Ease of Setup: 9.2/10
Pexels
Known to be one of the most well-curated collections of free stock photos on the internet, many bloggers prefer to use Pexels.
The website is also known to be user-friendly. The interface is easy to navigate. The site features the most popular photos over the last 30 days, making it easier for users to find new images.
Pexels also puts a premium on the talent and skills of their contributors by featuring their works on its social media platforms and blog posts.
Ratings
Top Qualities: Free photos arranged by theme; features UI mockups for designers
Ease of Use: 9.4/10
Quality of Support: 8.7/10
Ease of Setup: 9/10
Freepik
Freepik strives to be the go-to destination for providing bloggers, graphic designers, and marketers with the best collection of high-quality stock images, vector designs, illustrations, mockups, and any design assets to produce personal and commercial projects. And the service is free!
Its powerful search optimization can determine what images and elements users need in quick succession. This, with a boost of AI image generation, means Freepik has everything covered.
Premium members will benefit from no need for attribution and a bunch of extra premium content. And with each download, you can feel good as contributors will benefit from receiving pay-per-download and attributions from free users.
Ratings
Top Qualities: Large collection of free stock images and many other design assets
Ease of Use: 9.4/10
Quality of Support: 8.7/10
Ease of Setup: 9.2/10
Unsplash
In terms of the sheer volume of free stock photos featured, Unsplash isn’t far behind competitor websites.
With a collection of over 3 million images, users have plenty of choice when it comes to high-quality photos and nature images.
Register for free on the website and you can collect pictures in themed folders. This makes it easier to browse through your favorite photos for your brand in the future.
Unsplash also has a slight edge over other competitors. The site can be accessed via an iOS app for iPads and iPhones.
Ratings
Top Qualities: Consistent with high-quality graphics; user-friendly tool; mobile-friendly
Ease of Use: 9.4/10
Quality of Support: 8.7/10
Ease of Setup: 9.2/10
Pikwizard
It is unusual for stock photo albums to have images of people doing natural poses but Pikwizard features a variety of such images. This makes the platform stand out among the rest of the sites offering free stock photos.
Another remarkable thing about this site is its selection of urban photography. So if you need stunning cityscapes, Pikwizard is the website to go.
Ratings
Top Qualities: Features planned and rehearsed images; provides online photo editors
Ease of Use: 9/10
Quality of Support: 8.8/10
Ease of Setup: 8.9/10
Gratisography
If your brand is more on the fun, quirky side, then Gratisography is the place to find visual content. The sites has been branded the “world’s quirkiest collection of high-resolution free stock images.”
While most stock photo websites focus on conventional visual content such as photos of skyscrapers or a photo of a person pointing at a whiteboard, Gratisography offers something more unique and creative.
The website does not offer as much content as the others do, but Ryan McGuire, the photographer and graphic designer behind Gratisography, adds one photo every week to his unique collection.
Ratings
Top Qualities: Consistent with high-quality graphics; quirky, unconventional images
Ease of Use: 9.4/10
Quality of Support: 9.2/10
Ease of Setup: 9/10
Reshot
Reshot is more than just a website that offers high-quality free stock photos. It is a company that gives emerging photographers a platform to showcase their talent and creativity to anyone who needs visuals.
As Reshot puts it, they are a community whose goal is to unite “creators via a free exchange of the world’s best visual content.”
Ratings
Top Qualities: Downloadable photo packs of curated images
Ease of Use: 9/10
Quality of Support: 8.7/10
Ease of Setup: 9/10
Picjumbo
When one door closes, another one opens. Had this adage been a person, he would be the photographer from the Czech Republic, Viktor Hanacek.
His photos got rejected by stock photo websites so many times that he finally decided to establish his name in the industry.
Picjumbo has since flourished, becoming a site that offers a wide collection of photos that fall into different categories such as business, abstract, wallpaper, travel, nature, vintage, etc.
If you are looking for even higher quality stock photos, you can subscribe to the site’s paid premium membership.
Ratings
Top Qualities: Helpful newsletter, blog, and other design resources
Ease of Use: 9/10
Quality of Support: 8.4/10
Ease of Setup: 9.1/10
Stockvault
Although it features nearly half of the total stock photos of other sites, many people prefer Stockvault
The site offers a plethora of free stock photos, wallpapers as well as textures. It also features more categories than any other website.
Stockvault also offers free design—from designing different images to navigating through Photoshop.
Ratings
Top Qualities: Blog posts to complement the content of the website; free tutorials about graphic design
Ease of Use: 9.3/10
Quality of Support: 9.2/10
Ease of Setup: 9.4/10
Morguefile
Morguefile is the place to go for both professional photographers and photo hobbyists. It’s a community where people can freely share photos, videos, vectors, and other types of illustrations.
The photos featured by Morguefile aren’t as well-organized and professionally produced as those on some of the other sites on this list.
However, many still favor site for creative projects because of two key features. The Classroom feature helps teach aspiring photographers better skills. The Quest feature challenges amateurs and professionals to complete theme-based tasks.
Ratings
Top Qualities: Classroom and Quest features
Ease of Use: 9.2/10
Quality of Support: 8.9/10
Ease of Setup: 9/10
Adobe Stock
Adobe has a library of over 70,000 free stock photos, videos, illustrations, and templates for both personal and commercial projects.
Skim through the site and find just about anything that you are looking for: from images to video transitions, and much more.
One notable feature of Adobe Stock is that you can also upload your own photos to the site to find free images that are similar in style.
Ratings
Top Qualities: High resolution images; contributors and photographers are paid
Ease of Use: 9.4/10
Quality of Support: 8.7/10
Ease of Setup: 9.2/10
Use free stock photos for your marketing and advertising campaigns
Picking the perfect image for your marketing collateral becomes easier with free stock photo sites.
Most of these websites offer free stock photos that are protected by the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
This gives you the freedom to use photos in any form without the need for licensing.
With a design solution like Venngage, you can use the free, high-resolution images and illustrations in professionally designed templates to create better marketing materials.
