One of the big issues that business and private blog owners constantly face is finding images for their posts and pages. Including an image or two can improve engagement, help break up text and add variety to written pages of text. It can also boost your SEO.
There are a number of sites online that offer free or nearly free images for your blog and below are some of the best of them.
Free Image Jargon
Public Domain Images are those where the copyright has expired or where the people who created the images have given up their rights and allow others to use the pictures or videos. There are literally millions of these across the internet and some of the sites below work to draw these all together.
Royalty Free Images are used by sites such as Shutterstock. You pay a certain amount to download the picture but don’t have to attribute or pay licensing fees.
Creative Commons licenses allow photographers and artists to choose how their images are used. A CC0 attribute means they have allowed their pictures to be used by anyone. CC2.0 means you can use them but you have to put in an attribution on your site.
- Pixabay boast around 700,000 copyright free images that you can download for your blog posts. These are released under the Creative Commons CC0 which means attribution is not required. That means you can copy, modify and distribute them without any permission.
- Death to the Stock Photo work as a co-operative to provide high quality images from their members to commercial enterprises. You do have to pay a premium membership if you want full access but after that all images are free.
- Unsplash are another small image site who supply 10 new images every day and have numerous collections that members can download under their CC0 license.
- The Public Domain Archive has a wide range of images and was created by a designer who got frustrated about finding free or low cost pictures for his projects. It’s more of a repository of images that are in the public domain rather than something like Shutterstock or Dreamstime.
- Pickup Image is another public domain image site with a relatively large portfolio. You can use them on your site and the owners suggest linking back to the photographer but this not generally enforced. Contributors include a variety of amateur and professional photographers with most photos of a reasonable quality.
- Gratis Photography provides free quality images for both private and commercial concerns in a number of categories from nature and people to buildings and objects. Quality varies but there are some great images that are free under the CC0 license.
- Life of Pix has a small but good collection of images and video available copyright free and is great for landscape views in particular. Content is gradually increasing though, so it’s a good free site to keep an eye on.
- Morgue File boasts a bunch of images by creatives for creatives and is a community based site with a large stock of photos to draw from. Quality is generally good across the board and you can access via a web site or on their smartphone app.
- Flickr have a Creative Commons section that gives you access to a wide range of photos, mostly from amateur snappers but many with good, posting quality. If you want access to over 71 million photos and videos, then all you need to do is sign up for an account.
- Splitshire encourages photographers around the world to share their unused images and allow royalty free access. With a range of categories including abstract, fashion and cars there is plenty to suit even the widest interests.