If you are a blogger or online writer, than you are familiar with wanting to use only the best photography images when you publish your articles, especially when you are deciding upon a featured blog hero image for your articles.
While taking your own personal photos is ideal, you might have reasons as to why you don’t, such as time constraints or not wanting to share personal images of your family or friends for anonymity sake.
For these times and more, you may want to utilize free stock images available online. But not all images are free and clear for you to use.
How and where can you easily great quality stock images online?
Take a look below now, as I have compiled a list of the six best royalty free stock image sites to help get you started.
1. The Stocks – The Stocks brings together all the best royalty free stock photos from the top resources in one, clean, easy-to-navigate website. Not everything is may indeed be totally free or even searchable, but if you have a bit of time to search their site to find the free images that could work, it is a great place to start.
2. Death To Stock Photo – No searching here, because their free images are only available by email. When you sign up for the first time, you will receive your first email of free images and then every month you will receive more. And since these photos are sent you directly through email only once a month, it’s a really good way to start building your very own collection of images that you can use not only right now, but in the future, as well.
3. Pixabay – Pixabay is honestly my go-to site for free stock images as they have over 300,000 free photos, vectors and art illustrations to search and use immediately. Honestly, Pixabay is a treasure trove of royalty free stock images for all.
4. Graphic Burger – Just from their description alone of being a “buffet of premium quality design resources offered for free to their community, where you’ll not only find exclusive PSD files “cooked” in-house along with some featured top-notch freebies from creatives around the world, but also is truly an amazing resource with photos and images once again free for all commercial use.
5. PicJumbo – PicJumbo is like Pixabay is one of my favorite sites to find really good, high quality, free stock photos, because not only do they also have a huge selection of free images, but have categories that makes their great images even easier to find.
6. morgueFile – morgueFile also has thousands of free stock photos that are all searchable, but has been around for a long time having been founded back in the mid 1990s to serve as a free image site for creative professionals and also teachers to use in their work. This same mission for their site remains true today as all photo images are indeed free for all to download and re-use in their workforce commercial use or not, too. Their photos are from all over the world from professionals and even hobbyists, as well.
Now that you have a place to start searching for those awesome stock images, please check out my past article on how to create/edit the perfect blog hero image, as well.
And if you need any further assistance or help, please also feel free to reach out and CONTACT ME.
Awesome info! Thanks for putting this resource together!
Thanks Meredith and absolutely my pleasure!! 🙂
I love Pixabay. What a wonderful site, easy to use, and free stuff:)
Seana Turner recently posted…Headlines from the National Organizing Conference
I agree totally Seana about Pixabay!! 😉
This is a great list! I usually use Pixabay and PicJumbo, but i’m going to try the other ones too. Thanks for sharing.
Happy to share with you, Ana and so glad you are going to try a few new ones out I listed here now!! 🙂
Janine,
Thanks so much for all the great information on finding stock images. I love reading J9 designs and refer back to it. It is really a great resource when trying to remember how to do something blogging related.
Blessings,
Diane
Thank always Diane and my pleasure to share about stock image sites here today with you, too!! 🙂
Yayay! Fun stuff here, Janine. And of course I love stock image sites…thought about taking photos for some of them myself…in another life. 😀
You would have been awesome at this and if you did, you would have so been my number one place to search out and use!! 🙂
Great resource! I love a great stock photo for blog posts, but I also use them for my media kit! It’s a great way to spice up my blog facts and figures. Thanks so much for sharing this with us on #shinebloghop this week!`
My pleasure and so happy to share and help out with this, Maria!! 🙂
Pinned! Pinned! Pinned! What a fantastic resource. I really needed some new photo inspiration. Thank you!
Thank you so much for pinning, Jen!!!! 😉
Great list Janine – I only knew about Pixaby; thanks for sharing!
Candace recently posted…How To Easily Create a Photo Collage
Happy to share with you, Candace!! 😉
So helpful! Pinned (might as well join the rest of the blogging world from the looks of it!). Stopping by from the #ShineBlogHop…congratulations on your feature!
Elizabeth @ Guilty Chocoholic Mama recently posted…Dear Dad: Thanks For Getting So Much Right
Thank you so much for pinning and so happy that this could indeed help you and so many out, too!! 🙂
Thanks, Janine! I signed up on Pixabay and Death to Stock Photo after reading this post earlier, and a lot of those photos are really good. Thanks for the tips!
You are so welcome, Chris!! 😉
Great list. It’s funny that I only know App.Boundforstyle and Pixabay. The other five are worth a try. Thanks!
Happy to share and hope you can try the others soon now, Robin.