We love great images – for creative design, and websites – the perfect image can help translate your brand and create the ‘feel good’ factor!
Our go-to site for truly amazing images is Shutterstock, they offer a variety of licenses at a great price.
It’s important when sourcing the right image for your business that you understand the restrictions. Downloading an image straight from google is a big no, always check the small print before you put an image in place. If you are unsure, we are here to help.
Here are 5 free stock image websites, they may just hold the perfect image you are trying to find!
Unsplash
With a very large collection on offer, all photos are high resolution (great for print) with the option to credit the photographer on download. The Unsplash team kindly search and feature the very best of new submission photos on their homepage. You may just be one click away from the perfect photo.
Pexels
Offer an amazingly large collection of quality free stock photos, licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CCO) license. With all the photos being tagged and searchable, Pexels offer a smooth discovery as you travel through their discover pages.
StockSnap
Their promise says it all ‘We promise our users an ever-expanding collection of the best, most beautiful stock images for free. And we offer these images under a single, simple CC0 license that lets you do what you want with all our photos, with no attribution required’
Reshot
Offer a massive library of handpicked free stock images, their mission is to ‘unify creators and elevate creative projects’. Their licence page or rather a lovely readable paragraph, assures users in laymen terms that you are totally free to use the photos for commercial and non-commercial purposes.
Pixabay
Holds a great mix of free to download or pay as you go images, vectors and art illustrations. When you enter your search, you immediately discover pages of top quality photos free to download. Non- intrusively you also get a little sample at the top of those available to purchase. A perfect mix that gives you both options in the same place.
Once you have your image or photo, if it’s appearing on your website you will need to ensure it is fully optimised. The benefits of this are huge as it means your chosen image will continue to look its very best, load quickly when people arrive on your site and ensure ease when search engines go to index.
For designers, their work quite often progresses to print in all manner of forms. A low quality image can break nearly any design, we recommend using a hi resolution image, at around 300dpi at the very least. Most image sites offer varying forms of downloads, if you are unsure always go for the biggest. The Free image sites often automatically download in hi resolution.
Happy image searching…
Header Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash