A picture speaks more than a thousand words. Whether you are writing a blog or designing your website, an additional image helps to deliver the right message. It also increases the visitors’ attention span. The bounce rate of a page without an image is more than that of a page with a relevant image.

Having said that, using a copyright image without permission is illegal and unethical. There are platforms which provide royalty free and free stock images. Here is a list of top 11 websites for free stock images:



Wikimedia Commons is a project of Wikimedia Foundation. It provides multimedia images, sounds and videos which are free to use.

Flickr is an image and video hosting site which is widely used by bloggers. It has a section called ‘creative commons’ where the users agree to share their images for free and do not hold any usage rights. Images under this category are free to use and share

Unsplash is a project of oomf. You get 10 new photos every 10 days. All photos are of high resolution and can be downloaded easily without any sign up or log in. You get excellent pictures but the pictures are not tagged so it becomes difficult to search for relevant images.

FreeRange Stock is a collaborative platform where people upload and share their photos for people to download and use for free. People who upload photos are entitled to learn from the Freerange Academy.

MorgueFile is a project initiated by Michael Connors in 1996. It contains large number of high resolution images which are absolutely free to use.

Pixabay has a large repository of photos and cliparts which are free to use and share. It was founded in Germany by Simon Steinberger in 2010.

Death to the stock photo is an initiative to put an end to the word ‘stock’. Signup on their website here and you get 10 photos in your mailbox each month. You are free to do whatever you like with these images.

Stockvault is a photo sharing website which enables people to share photos for free. All the images available on the site are stock and royalty free. The site was founded by Bjorgvin Gudmundsson in 2004.

OpenPhoto offers a wide range of images across various categories. The images are tagged relevantly and can be searched easily within the website. It was created by Michael Jastremski in 1998.

Co-Photo has a limited collection of pictures but nonetheless the collection is excellent. They gather photos from the open sources and offer it for free.

Freepik hosts high quality visual graphics like photos, vectors, illustrations and PSD files. The images are well organised according to their categories. One of the goof resources for designers and bloggers.

It is always a good practice to provide proper credits to the source of the image. Go through the Creative Commons License here for better understanding about the usage.

Tip: Search For Free Stock Images in Google

Step 1: Go to Google Image Search by clicking here.

Step 2: Search for the required image.

Step 3: Click on ‘Search Tools’.

Step 4: Click on ‘Usage Rights’.

Step 5: Select the appropriate choice.

Do you know any other websites for free stock images? Do let us know in the comments below.