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Where to Find the Best Royalty Free Images for Your Blog Posts
Last updated on Mar 3, 2021 by Waseem Abbas
Are you looking for some royalty free images for your website? Adding images to your content will help you to attract more readers (and hold their interest), however it’s not always easy to find good quality, royalty free images.
In this article, we will share the best places to find royalty free images for your blog posts.
If your a photographer you’ll even find these sites to be great places to upload your images and get some exposure. We also have a guide on the Best Places to Sell Photos Online and Make Money.
To edit these pictures like a professional, we recommended getting Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop together here in Adobe’s Creative Cloud Plan.
1. FreeImages
FreeImages formerly stock.xchng, has a large collection (300,000+) of photos and illustrations that are well categorized and searchable. There are many ways to find the perfect photo for your blog even new and popular filters.
2. Pixabay
Pixabay is a popular place to find royalty free images that are CC-0 licensed. All the images are organized into categories and tags, so they’re easy to find.
One of the amazing features of this site is the advanced search feature that allows you to search by color!
3. Unsplash
Unsplash has royalty free CC-0 licensed and public domain photos. It also has a great search feature to find images by theme, such as greenery, skies, portfolios, and more.
For fun, there is a Google Chrome extension that displays a new photo in the background every time you open a new tab. (You can also download this background image for personal use.)
4. Photo Pin
Using the Flickr API, Photo Pin is an amazing platform to find images for your website and blog. It searches creative common licensed photos from around the web.
Tip: Try searching by author if you want to find more images from a photographer you like.
5. Pexels
Pexels is an uber-popular website with a large collection of royalty free and public domain photos. You can freely use these images on your website and blog.
All the images are high quality and properly categorized. It is very simple to find images by filtering them into categories or tags.
6. Public Domain Pictures
There are many royalty free and public domain photos available at Public Domain Pictures. You can use the search feature to find something specific, or just browse the categories.
7. New Old Stock
New Old Stock contains only historical vintage images sourced from public archives. Beautiful images capturing amazing events from the past. All these images are in the public domain.
8. Pickup Image
Pickup Image has royalty free photos and clipart. They are all searchable, and divided into tags and categories for ease of browsing.
9. Public Domain Archive
High Quality images that are royalty free and stock photos are available at Public Domain Archive. This website has a range of new and old style photos.
They are searchable, or you can view the categories.
10. SplitShire
You can find a collection of Daniel Nanescu’s photos that are CC-0 licensed and royalty free images at SplitShire. He adds new images on a regular basis.
Simply search the images with the mosaic view, or filter the photos by tags to find the right images for your website and blog.
11. LibreShot
More than 40 million royalty free images and stock photos are available at LibreShot with CC-0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. You can use these photos on your website or blog for free.
12. Skitterphoto
You’ll find many unique photos that aren’t commonly used at Skitterphoto. All images are royalty free and CC-0 public domain.
13. Stocksnap.io
Stocksnap.io is a beautiful website filled with amazing royalty free and CC-0 licensed photos. These images are well categorized. There is also a search bar or you can filter the photos by categories and tags.
14. WikiMedia Commons
One of the largest sources of royalty free images is WikiMedia Commons, a project of the WikiMedia Foundation. They allow you to use the images for free or give attribution to the photos that ask for it.
However, you can also find many images in the public domain which do not require any mention. Just make sure you check out the information below the image before you use it.
15. ImageFinder
ImageFinder boasts over 130,000 high quality free stock images from some of the world’s best photographers.
Categories are based off of popularity and there is even a trending and new tab. This site is great for stock nature, fashion or generic blog post pictures with images that purposely allow you space to write text on the picture.
16. ShutterStock
ShutterStock is a paid platform. However, it has a large variety of images and vectors that you can use in your website and blog, royalty free. These images are available in multiple sizes and formats.
17. MyStockPhotos
MyStockPhotos is has a simple interface and is designed to fill your WordPress site with beautiful photographs for free. It’s made by the same people behind Optimole and ThemeIsle so you can trust the source and quality.
We hope this article has helped you to learn how to find royalty free images for your blog posts. You may also want to check out our guides on 9 tools to create better images for blog posts & social media and Where to Find Free Images to Use for your Website and Blog.
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There is so much out there by now, it’s hard to choose. I think my favorite sites are two rather new players who understand that they need to differentiate themselves. RawPixel and OneLeftMedia, although small, both provide authentic images that are distinctly different from the bulk.
I like this compilation. You included several smaller but very interesting sites; New Old Stock definitely stands out. I also use these ones:
Death to Stock https://deathtothestockphoto.com – non-stocky photos,
Moose https://photos.icons8.com – matching photos and collages,
Old Book Illustrations https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/
Another great place to search is pexels.com and https://imagefinder.co
They both have tons of free stock images to search for.
Thanks Melinda, added to the list!
Great list!
This list is VERY helpful! Thanks for putting it together.
I have a few copyright questions. Regarding the images in your blog, they look like screen shots of the sites’ homepages. Do we need permission from the websites if we are to use content like you have above?
And what if I want to create a “Best of Show” or “Last-Minute Gifts” blog. Would I need permission to post photos of the products in my blog? For instance, if I include an iPhone as a gift item, would I need permission from Apple to use a photo of their phone? Or do I simply give credit and specify where I got the photo (e.g., Image: Apple)?
Thanks for any help!
Thanks for putting it together.
Thanks,
Michael
Don’t forget morguefile.com, 400,000 free photos, has been around since 2002
I wonder what the position is with facebook? Where images are distributed freely.. also if you put up a share button and the image is in your page are you not actually asking that it is shared??
CC BY : This license allows you to use the image for whatever purpose you want, but you have to attribute it. If you change the image, you can then change the license to whatever you want.