If you wish to capture your audience’s attention on the web you need to make your content more visual than ever before.
The evolution of sites like Pinterest and stats on other social media sites showing that images receive more engagement bolster this view. But where does one get all of these images? Your vacation photos can only go so far and paying a recurring premium for stock photos may not be an option for small businesses. Also, many argue that stock photos tend to look boring and generic.
So how about free images that are also nice to look at? This post will run you through places where you can get royalty free images for your websites.
1. Pixabay:
This site which claims to have over 370,000 free images, vectors and art illustrations. These images can be used even without attribution for commercial use. Yes, you read that right. This aspect separates Pixabay from the rest of the list, and the reason why we have it on top here. They have a leader board and editor’s choice section which showcases the best among the rest. I searched for “business people” and it quickly returned 655 images that I could choose from.
2. ImageSource:
This site provides royalty free images. A search for the keyword “business” returned 1,57,203 results and all of the results on the first page were pretty accurate and high quality. You can choose the gender, age, ethnicity, composition, view point, color, setting, and much more. These filters make searching much easier.
Signing up for an account gives you the ability to create and edit your own collection of pictures. You can even comment, rate, and tag the images.
3. Foter:
Foter has a simple to use interface and you can filter images by the licence types – commercial and non-commercial. It has tons of free stock photos, but the key is to be as descriptive as possible when you are searching for the image you need. Otherwise, you’ll end up getting unrelated images.
4. Stockvault:
As the name suggests, StockVault is a website where photographers and others share their images so that others can use them. They have several categories such as 3D renders, seasonal, textures, animals, etc.
5. Every Stock Photo:
Everystockphoto.com is a free image search engine which give you the ability to choose photos by source, width & height, resolution and more. The site aggregates images from Flickr, NASA, WikiMedia Commons and RGBStock.
6. Unrestricted Stock:
If you are a designer searching for stock photos and vectors, this site provides designer fonts and stock art at no charge. My favorite among their collection is Toronto’s skyline.