A picture is worth a thousand words and thousand words makes up a boring paragraph. What makes you take a look at the magazine? Catchy headlines with crispy images, right? An image not just compliments the content the writer is trying to convey, it actually overrides it. I don’t know about you, but I am a visual learner. I relate more to pictures than words. It is proven by scientific studies that human mind can grasp the contents more easily with pictures than words and easily memorize it.
So, the bottom line is that you must have at least one image per post for your blog, to make it appealing to the readers. Great images are hard to find, but more difficult is to find royalty-free stock images. If you have a blog, great! If you have a blog with images, outstanding! But if you have a blog and finding it hard to search the relevant free images, don’t worry. This post will help you find some of the great collections of free images on the web.
- PhotoRack
- Free Stock Photography
- ImageBase
- MorgueFile
- Public Domain Photos
- Free Digital Photos
- Pixel Perfect Digital
- SXC
- Free Image Files
- Free Pixels
A really great collection of around 28,000 free stock photos divided across 12 main categories and numerous sub-categories. You can use the images from this site for personal or commercial purpose without any back-link (attribution) to the site. If you are in need of creative photos without link back, this site is for you.
Another great site hosting over 1000 royalty-free stock images distributed across 15 categories like careers, jobs, industries, technology, abstracts, landscapes and so on. No attribution required.
This site hosts high-quality stock photos across 6 different categories. The images are provided in two resolutions – 1600×1200 and 3072×2048. For all practical purposes, these sizes are big enough and in fact, you might have to trim the size down. Quality of the photos is absolutely stunning. No attribution is required and you are free to use it for personal or commercial purpose.
A huge collection of over 200K high-quality images with fine-grain classification. This is one of my personal favorites. Again, no attribution required.
Another handy resource when it comes to free images. This site contains over 5000 different images, most notably useful for travel and scenic photos. However, it is always useful to keep this in your resource list. You may never know when you hit the right spot! As these are public domain images, no need to provide attribution link.
This is another site with vast collection of images which you may find useful. The site provides free images, but you need to provide an attribution link with the image as an acknowledgment.
This site might not be the largest collection of free photos, but it definitely contains some astonishing quality images for free use which other sites charge for. Search facility is not very great, but image classification is quite decent. Worth having in your list of bookmarks!
This is one of the best out there when it comes to free stock images and one of my favorites. With such a quality resource with over 350000 images, you may never need other site to look for. The only downside is that you will need to sign up for downloading the images, but that’s very small price to pay for such a great treat.
A relatively simple free stock photo site with not so many categories, but may come handy when all else turns negative. A great drawback for this site is missing search section. So, you have to rely on tag-based selection only. Attribution link required.
This is another site hosting over 3000 free stock images with over 30 categories. This site is especially useful for internet or computer related images. If your niche is technology, then you may find this site useful. An attribution link is required.
Apart from these sites, you can always take snaps and upload them to your blog and of course, there is Flickr, which is all too well-known to mention. One thing where Flickr really stands out is it’s highly sophisticated image search facility and image size options while downloading. Oh, and by no means, this list is complete. There are tons of similar sites providing you with lot of good free images. Keep your eyes open, read the licensing terms while downloading and be creative. What are you waiting for? Start searching now and spice up your blog with relevant pictures. Keep geeking!
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Some free photo sites good sites listed there, but a couple of them really stick out, like “Free Image Files” it’s a dreadful site when you think there are dozens more far better sites you have left unlisted, rgbstock, creativity103, photoxpress ?
.-= budgetstockphoto´s last blog ..Christmas Images Update =-.
@budgetstockphoto, You are right about missing out sites like rgbstock which hosts quality photos for free. As for creativity103, I found it more suitable for backgrounds or texture images which are not very useful for a blogger. Photoexpress does provide quality photos but it hosts mostly paid photographs, except few which needs sign up. I wanted to list all those resources which are absolutely free.
It’s great to have your feedback!
Nice research Harsh.Some of the sites are new to me.Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Lakhyajyoti. Hope you have benefited from this post.
A great comprehensive list, some of the best, especially SXC noteably for it’s huge library, and as mentioned some great images available under creative commons licence at Flickr. Just make sure when using images from any of these sources that you abide by the terms of the licence.
Absolutely right. I see that your site has some nice collection of images. Keep it up!
Thanks . Some site is new with me . Just bookmark it
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You are welcome
Thnx Harsh. Great post. Have found new sites for myself. Sometimes it is just impossible to find sth u need and then have to search through many sites… thats why i love such posts, you may also find sth interesting in them))))) But i would add some sites here as well, for ex http://www.photl.com or dreamstime.com
You’ve definitely got some top agencies listed but there are literally hundreds out there and some of the really good free sites are missing. We review, rate & rank the best stock agencies so check our site for more info: http://www.whichstockagency.com/en/19/category/free-images/agencies. Also, we list all the current promo codes, discounts & freebies for stock agencies if you want to try a traditional agency: http://www.whichstockagency.com/en/134/offers.
check out http://www.freestockfor.us and http://www.allourstock.com both 100% free as far as I can tell (Creative Commons licensing)
http://uploadpic.net is where I upload my pictures
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