It is an absolute truth that as a blogger, you need to use high quality images on your posts. If you don’t have the time nor the talent to take gorgeous images yourself, you can always purchase stock photos from iStockphoto, Shutterstock, Haute Stock, SC Stockshop, Etsy, or Creative Market — if you have the budget. If you don’t, take heart. You don’t have to resort to stealing images off of Google search and risking copyright violations. Believe it or not, there are actually talented and generous people out there who share their photographs to the world for free.
Here are the best options for high quality stock images that will look great on blogs or websites.
Unsplash
Not only are these high-resolution images free, you are also free to do whatever you want with them. No restrictions. And the images are stunning! Unsplash has the widest variety of themes and a large repository of great photographs. You will be spoilt for choice.
Death to the Stock Photo
Death to the Stock Photo sends out mailers every month with an image pack and a story. I really like that. Their images are well-thought of, nicely styled (or unstyled), and their images really fit the current aesthetic.
Pixabay
Pixabay is a curated library of free photos, vectors, and illustrations. They’re all published under a creative commons license, so you are free to use them without paying attribution or asking permission. I found it more difficult to sift through the images on this site to get the ones I liked, but there are plenty.
Pikwizard
Pikwizard has over 100,000 completely free images on the site, and over 20,000 of those are exclusive to them. They are also adding new images to the library daily with the ultimate goal of reaching more than 1 million images. Most of the really nice ones are available only on premium, but there are still tons of choices.
There are dozens of other websites out there that offer free stock photos; I only named my favourites. What a blessing they are to web designers, bloggers, and creative professionals! I personally like to style and shoot my own images, but I also rely on these stock photos for when I don’t have the luxury of time.
