If you’re looking for the best stock photo sites, then you’ve come to the right place. Whilst working on your projects, you’ll no doubt come across situations where a stock photo will be just the ticket. If you don’t know where to find stock photos, then this can be really frustrating.

As the world of stock photos is vast and quite complicated, we’ve broken this list into 2 lists:

Free stock photo sites.

Paid stock photo sites.

We’ve listed the free stock photo sites first, as we’re assuming most readers are looking first for free photo resources. But if paid stock is what you’re looking for, then the sites in the second list will cater to your needs substantially.

Without getting into a lengthy discussion about the pros and cons of each, there’s certainly a place for both free stock photos and paid for stock photos. You need to decide whether you’re going to go for free stock or paid stock and this will depend largely on the type of project and the budget you have.

So, without further ado, let’s get into the list of the best stock photo sites on the web.

The Best Free Stock Photo Sites

Let’s start off with the top free stock photo resources out there.

1. Pexels

Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through our discover pages.

Currently we cover over 40,000 free stock photos. And every month at least 3,000 new high resolution photos will be added. All photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by our users or sourced from free image websites. We make sure all published pictures are high-quality and licensed under CC0.

Free, use as you please, high-resolution stock photos for personal and commercial projects. This project was created by Ryan McGuire.

3. Pixabay

Pixabay.com is an international website for sharing high quality public domain photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and film footage. Pixabay offers over 1,188,454 free photos, illustrations, and vectors and videos.



Beautiful free images for personal and commercial use. All business, food, people and technology photos are free, high-resolution, and no attribution is required. CC0.

Sign up to get 7 hi-res images zipped up in your inbox every 7 days. Use them anyway you want.

“Death to Stock is a resource, belief system, and call to action for artists around the world who unite in their journeys to make their own way.

Our mission is to resource the creatives with tools they can use for their projects, teach them what we know, and consistently fuel them.

We believe that everyone can be an artist, because being an artist is an approach to your craft rather than a title you acquire.

We pursue this mission because isolation, inequality, and scarce resources lead us to remove humanity from our art. “Stock” is as much a programmed mentality as it is a category of media.

Death to Stock is not concerned with quantity. Our focus is a member-based experience that shows up to push you into the future with fresh media, education, and direction.

Let’s make something together.”

High quality free stock photos in one place. 354 Million Free Stock Photos.

Search and download beautiful free stock photos for personal and commercial use. Free image download of more than 1900+ free high resolution pictures.

Hand picked free photos for your inspiration. Free photo of the day on Magdeleine.co, a blog that features the best free high-quality stock photographies for your inspiration.

Free Stock Photos For commercial Use. Download Free Photos In High Resolution. Free photos for websites, free photos for bogs. Free High Quality Photos CC0.

Free high quality images for your website and blog. Free stock photos for both personal and commercial use.

Find the best free stock images. Download all images and use them in your projects.

“Burst is a free stock photo platform that is powered by Shopify. Our image library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images that were shot by our global community of photographers.

We built Burst to provide designers, developers, bloggers and entrepreneurs with access to beautiful free stock photography. You can use our pictures for just about anything — your website, blog or online store, school projects, Instagram ads, facebook posts, desktop backgrounds, client work and more.

All our photos are free for commercial use with no attribution required; you can read more about this on our license page.”

“Free photos for startups, bloggers, publishers, websites, designers, developers, creators, & everyone else.

Startup Stock Photos was started as an outlet for photos we were already taking on a regular basis. It’s grown to be much more than that. People and organization all over the world have used these photos to make some really awesome things. We’re happy to have helped.

What time we have outside of our work and projects we aim to spend finding and sharing the productive spaces of the world with other creators. We hope this project continues to be useful, and serves as a positive representation of the world of tech today.”

Free stock photos from Jay Mantri. All photos are free from copyright restrictions – no attribution required.

Free stock photography at freerangestock.com. High-resolution stock images and textures for free with photographer ad revenue sharing system.

Morguefile.com. Over 380000 high quality, high resolution photos. Free for commercial use. No attribution required.

“Unique stock photo site with free images for commercial use. CC0 license. Just search, download and use. No attribution required. Enjoy! All photos has guaranteed origin – all are taken by me. All pictures are licensed using CC0 so you can use them without attribution – But I’ll be very grateful if you will :-)”

Free stock photos and creative commons (cc0) and public domain photos. All free for commercial use with no strings attached.

Every day we handpick and giveaway two free authentic photos from real people. Each photo is licensed under CC0 and can be used commercially.

Igor Ovsyannykov started Fancycrave 3 years ago, completely from scratch.

It all started in February 2015 when he decided to start giving away 2 free photos from his travels around Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Laos, and Japan.

The goal was to help fellow designers, small businesses, students, bloggers, and online marketers who want to convey their message in style.

Things escalated quite a bit from there and Fancycrave grew in popularity. Today you can find our photos being used for social media, email newsletters, mockups, blog graphics, etc.

Picography has been providing stunning images to millions of people for the past 3 years. It is now one of the top sources for gorgeous, high-resolution, free photos.

You can use any of our free stock photos however and wherever you like, with no attribution required. All photos are CC0 licensed. You can learn more about our terms here.

Over 300,000 free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.

300,000+ photos for your next project. With a huge library of photos and thousands more being added each day, chances are we’ve got a photo for you.

Find inspiration in the new photos we hand-select every day or use our search to find and download exactly what you’re looking for.

Refe is a marketplace of royalty-free, high-quality, natural looking photos of people interacting with technology. Here are free photos for your personal or commercial projects.

Welcome to StockSnap!

We know how crucial finding precisely the right image can be to the success of your creative project.

Whether you’re building a business website, creating a print brochure, crafting a digital or magazine ad, or some other brilliant creative project, you know that a great image helps your content transcend “good” and become “great.” Compelling, eye-catching, attention-grabbing work on the web especially needs sharp, arresting visual images to succeed.

That, in essence, is why StockSnap exists.

We offer beautiful, high quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of – including commercial usage – for free. No tricks, no gimmicks, no fine print; just dazzling images for your creative projects.

Skitterphoto has been around since 2014 and was founded by passionate amateur photographers from The Netherlands. Skitterphoto now offers photographers around the world the opportunity to show off their work and share their work worldwide through our renewed platform.

All photos on Skitterphoto are public domain using Creative Commons CC0

“I created SplitShire with the simple aim of giving life to photographs that would have gone into oblivion without any utility. In the course of almost ten years of photography I have accumulated many files, thousands, who were in the hard disk gathering dust. So I began to upload the first 100 high-resolution photos that you can freely download and use for personal an commercial purposes.

Now these photographs which were previously living in the darkest corners of the hard drive, live on websites like The Huffington Post, CNN, Books Covers, Magazines and thousands of websites/blogs.

I want to personally thank you for stopping by my site SplitShire, where I share all of my personal shots to the public for free. It might sound like I’m a little crazy, but anyone who has ever done any graphic design work, which is what I also do, knows it is so hard to find great pictures.

So far since the time of this writing we have had over 2.000,000 downloads, and over 6,000,000 page views. That just makes me feel great in so many ways.

I make it so easy to get my shots that any and everyone can use SplitShire, from designers, bloggers, website creators, social marketing gurus, companies.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaiFuyTbGLE

Free high-resolution photos, no copyrights restrictions for personal and commercial use. New photographies added weekly! All images are donated to the public domain. Warning: no mass distribution allowed. Distributors are allowed to repost a maximum of 10 images without our written Life of Pix consent. Hand-made with love by LEEROY Digital Agency in Montreal & its network of photographers.

Food photographers from all around the world share their photos under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license to help accomplish the ultimate goal of Foodiesfeed, to make the online space related to food more beautiful and eliminate all the ugly sterile stock photos that people still keep using.

Whether you’re a hobby or professional photographer, food blogger, passionate foodie or there are just some food photos hanging in your cloud drive that could be used by other modern creatives, join the community and help us with our mission.

Welcome to ShotStash! We’re a small independently managed free stock photo site. Our mission is to create and offer for free a highly curated collection of beautiful stock images that you can use both personally and commercially.

Whether you’re building a brand new website for your business or creating a blog about your personal life, you’re going to need images.

The right image is more than an accent. It’s no longer optional. These days, website and social users expect to see great photographs that reinforce your message and evoke just the right emotional response.

That’s the power of a fabulous photograph, and that’s why we’re here: to help you find just the right image to put the finishing touch on all of your creative projects.

We have four collections of stock photos you can download here:

You can preview these collections below. And if you’re stuck thinking of ways you can use these images in your marketing campaigns, scroll down for seven ways you can use stock photos to give your content some pizazz.

“Moment (MMT) provides free CC0 photography for personal and commercial use on websites, projects, themes, apps, and more.

I launched MMT in 2014 to share my love of photography with the world. Over the years I’ve taken countless photos and wanted to post some of those photos to use for free and give back to the online community.

The content spans many categories, including nature, city scenes, workspaces, and macro photography. These photos can be freely downloaded, used, and redistributed for both personal and commercial purposes.”

Everyone knows Flickr. Flickr (pronounced “flicker”) is an image hosting service and video hosting service. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and is currently owned by SmugMug.

In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs and an online community, the service is widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.

“As Visual & UX designer and Lean Startup coach I create a lot of landing pages and prototypes to collect feedback and test various business ideas, so I know how important it is to make things FAST yet still beautiful (yes, we all believe in low fidelity prototypes but people still prefer beautiful things :)).

Finding images that carry the right message usually takes hours, therefore every photo I make in my spare time will appear here for you. All of them are free for personal & commercial use.”

ISO Republic is an independent website that provides CC0 stock photos for creative professionals. All images are free for personal and commercial use.

Born in Berlin, Raised All over the World

In 2010, our four co-founders came together to host one of the first mobile photography exhibitions out of a Berlin subway station. Rooted in a real love of photography and desire to empower creators, what started (quite literally) as an underground art movement has since grown into the world’s most engaged creative community – and a definitive visual platform for today’s content demands.

“You are allowed to use our images for any commercial or non-commercial purposes. However, the image copyright is still the property of its author.

You are free to adapt and use them for commercial purposes without attributing the original author or source. Although not required, a link back to Styledstock.co is appreciated.”

Vintage photos from the public archives. Free of known copyright restrictions. Recapturing History.

Best Paid Stock Photo Sites

The following are the top paid stock photo sites. The charges vary and some of these have free categories included in their catalogues.

Shutterstock is a leading global technology company offering a creative platform for high-quality assets, tools and services.

The company’s portfolio includes Bigstock, a value-oriented stock media agency; Shutterstock Custom, a custom content creation platform; Offset, a high-end image collection; PremiumBeat, a curated royalty-free music library; and Rex Features, a premier source of editorial images for the world’s media.

Depositphotos — is a commercial platform that brings authors of high-quality licensed stock photos, graphics, vectors and videos together with appreciative buyers. Thanks to the efforts of talented professionals from all over the globe and our world-class technical solutions, we were able to build a perfect place to marry business with creativity.

Discover more than 35 million cheap royalty-free images, vectors and videos. Fotolia is the image bank for all your publishing and marketing projects!

“We believe in real-life, authentic, aesthetic, fresh and fair stock photos. That’s why we’ve been offering unconventional stock photos on various themes since 2001. We inspire you through our search engine, and make it super easy to buy photos, and we’re always there to answer questions. Working from a pool of curated photos means you’ll have more time to be creative.”

Founded in 2000, iStock created the crowd-sourced stock industry and became the original source for user-generated stock photos, vectors and illustrations, and video clips.

Find the perfect image to enhance your next creative project. Right inside your Adobe Creative Cloud apps. Preview watermarked images inside your designs first. Then license, access and manage them directly within Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, and other Adobe desktop apps.

As a 100% bootstrapped company since 2005, we have grown to be one of the world’s largest digital stock agency with an evenly distributed global footprint. 123RF has helped a wide clientele of individuals and businesses tell their stories using creative imagery, sounds and motion contributed by talents from around the world. Moving forward, we are ready to impact the creative industry in a big way as a global player that enables creative solutions through constant innovation, new products and services. So keep an eye out for us!

Dreamstime is one of the world leaders in stock photography and a reliable supplier of high quality digital images at affordable prices. Online since 2000 as a Royalty-Free stock photography website, Dreamstime has evolved into a powerful and active community-based site.

The exquisite stock image gallery you can browse today has been uploaded by photographers from all over the world, shot on film or digital. To ensure you receive the best content, all images are reviewed and approved by experienced editors. The Dreamstime database is renewed with thousands of fresh images and titles on a daily basis.

Download royalty-free images, high-resolution stock photos, vector art and illustrations from Thinkstock UK. High-quality, affordable stock photography subscriptions.

Find high resolution royalty-free images, editorial stock photos, vector art, video footage clips and stock music licensing at the richest image search photo library online.

The Best Stock Photo Sites – Summary

We really hope this list of the best stock photo sites has been helpful to you. As ever, when it comes to free stock photos vs. paid stock photos, the choice is yours and really depends on your budget and the type of project you’re engaged in.

One thing to remember is that it’s a common misconception that ‘royalty free’ means actually free. Royalty free actually just means the right to use copyright material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each photo used.

So when a stock photo site is talking about ‘royalty free,’ understand that they’re referring to that and not saying that their entire collection is free. If you’re looking for actually physically free stock photos, then consult our first list.

And please remember to always check the licenses on these sites. Sometimes you will need to give attribution for using the image.

What did we miss? If we missed out your favorite stock photo resource, let us know in the comments below.