Our 4 favourite places to find royalty-free stock imagery

When you’re creating content - whether you’re working on a website, blog post, advert or poster - good quality photography is essential. However, not every creative project can provide a decent resource budget.

With so many sites providing high-quality, royalty-free images for free, there really is no excusing pinching images from Google image search, competitor sites or social media posts.

Here are 4 websites where you can find beautiful stock images that photographers have kindly shared with the world, with generous permissions for use. The images from all these sites can be freely used for commercial and non-commercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from, or provide credit to, the photographer or the host site (although, it’s always a nice thing to do).

Jéan Béller on Unsplash 

1. UnSplash

Sourced from contributors around the web, Unsplash currently has over 2 million free, high-resolution photos available to download, with more being added daily.

UnSplash is a particularly good site to head to if you’re after stylish, Instagram-influencer style portraits, travel shots or foodie snaps. 

They also have a current events category which is a fantastically useful resource for presentations and blogs.

Joshua McKnight on Pexels

2. Pexels

Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos and videos. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through their discover pages. 

Pexels' wide library of photos is particularly strong in terms of the diversity of people featured in their imagery, specifically in their inclusion of people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, and people with visible disabilities. 

3.Reshot

Whereas quite a lot of free resource websites share a lot of the same content, Reshot has plenty of great, original photos that you won’t find anywhere else. Reshot’s images feel particularly ‘authentic’ and candid in style.

Reshot doesn’t yet have as large a library as Unsplash, for example, but they are growing their offering and, it appears, will be offering illustrations and icons in addition to photography in the future. 

Dan Fador on Pixabay

4. Pixabay

Pixabay has the biggest and broadest offering of over 2.2 million free images. In addition to stock photography, Pixabay also features free illustrations, vector imagery, videos and music.