12 Amazing And Free Stock Photo Resources

11 Jan

There are various components, from typography to colors, that makes a design impressive. Photos used are definitely one of the most important factors.

Today, almost any type of photo we can dream of exists in the web. And, thankfully, there are many stock photo websites which helps us find them easily.

Here is a list of 12 free stock photo resources that you must bookmark:

stock.xchng

stock.xchng is probably the most popular service which provides free stock photos.

It has 1000s of high-quality images which are very well categorized. Usage requires a free membership.

MorgueFile

MorgueFile lets you to download photos without registration & it has a very open license to use images on almost any type of work.

Besides the free photos, it has an online classroom which teaches about photography & a crowded community discussing in its forums.

openphoto

openphoto is a very straightforward website with no details & extras. It simply presents the photos in categories.

Most of the images are licenses with CC:Attribution-ShareAlike (photo used).

Photo Rack

PhotoRack is a great resource for stock photos where all images can be used in any type of work.

It surprisingly lacks of one thing: a search function.

unprofound.com

unprofound.com is an awesome site which is ran with an amateur spirit.

There are lots of free stock photos to browse, they can be filtered by colors & they are totally free.

Freerange Stock

The site offers thousands of photos which can be used in commercial projects as well.

Photos can be browsed quickly, a popular images page shows you what's hot & more. Download requires free membership.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net

FreeDigitalPhotos offers both free & paid versions of images where the free versions are limited in size and requires a link back to the photographer.

Photos are categorized in detail & no registration is required.

FreeFoto.com

FreeFoto is a huge resource with a bunch of categories & their sub-categories.

Licensing is mostly offers an attribute for online use or a non-commercial offline use (photo used).

FreePixels

Although FreePixels isn't the biggest website, almost every photo included are high quality & beautiful.

They can be used in any type of projects an attribution is required (written or visual).

Public Domain Photos

The website has ~15,000 free stock photos & cliparts listed. No registration is required.

And, as the name states, the photos presented are very open-licensed.

DesignPacks

The website is relatively different than others. It offers downloads as design packs of 15 images.

Although it doesn't have a large database yet, the sets presented are pretty impressive.

Everystockphoto.com

Everystockphoto.com is a website which indexes images from other stock websites.

They are currently offering a search for ~5 million images.

Other Resources:

Here are more amazing resources which has great photos but can only be used in non-commercial projects.

Stockvault is a stock photo sharing website where photographers can upload any number of images & others can use them for free (only non-commercial)
Woophy is a photo community which focuses on geographical categorization of photos with an interactive search map.
Historical Stock Photos is a nice resource for finding, mostly black & white, historical photos.

Is your favorite resource missing? Please share them in the comments and we can add them to the list as well.

Tags: Photo
Filed under: Design, Other License, Various Objects
34 Comments

34 Responses for "12 Amazing And Free Stock Photo Resources"

Jordan Walker January 11th, 2010 at 8:49 am
Great list of resources.

Ted Rex January 11th, 2010 at 9:46 am
What a great resource to share. I made this page one of my three links for the day on my daily Design Thought blog:
http://designthoughtfortheday.blogspot.com/2010/01/01-11-privacy-no-longer-expected-10.html

All the best, Ted

Jamie Giberti January 11th, 2010 at 10:47 am
You missed out http://www.sxc.hu which is a very good collection of free images (and which is incidentally number 1 in google for “free stock images”).

Umut M. January 11th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
@Jamie,

Sxc.hu is included as the 1st item in the list. Agree that it is a great resource.

@Ted,

Thanks so much.

Curtis January 11th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Nice list, will definitely use these.

12 excelentes bancos de imágenes gratuitos January 11th, 2010 at 5:42 pm
[...] Aquí os dejo una excelente lista publicada hace unas horas en webresourcesdepot.com [...]

Greg Bulmash January 11th, 2010 at 8:44 pm
I’d suggest giving a nod to WikiMedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org

It gathers all the images used in Wikipedia, plus a lot more. It could use some better search features (including being able to search by license), but it’s a very interesting and useful resource.

Greg January 12th, 2010 at 1:48 am
rgbstock.com Is very new but up an running they took there time making sure it was done right and has alot of photos already to go by alot I belive its over 4000 and counting
This one will be big fast BUT still will be free and hold to the artist helps artist

Hernan January 12th, 2010 at 11:51 am
I would add http://www.photoxpress.com/ as one of the best.

Martin January 12th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
I’d like to shout out http://www.freeimages.co.uk, some of the images are not that big, but its always been a trusty source, I’d second sxc.hu / stockxchng, that’s top of my list too.

vlad January 13th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
What about Flickr with Creative Common search filter?
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=&l=commderiv&ss=0&ct=0&mt=all&w=all&adv=1

Elle January 13th, 2010 at 5:45 pm
Thank you for this resource! It’s great!

Bruno January 14th, 2010 at 12:46 pm
you forgot about cgtextures.com/

Michael Garmahis January 14th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
My version of best Free Stock Photos Sites

ProHerb January 18th, 2010 at 5:02 am
Greatest List, I love free pic.

Herman January 19th, 2010 at 4:22 am
http://www.rgbstock.com
An new and fast growing free stock photo site. Could be interesting too

Yakov January 19th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
http://www.KosherStock.com offers weekly free photos for personnal and commercial use. KS is a royalty-free microstock site (photos, illustrations and cliparts) focusing on the Jewish life, culture and religion.

Anna Sondej January 20th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Extended vertion (more than 50 free stock photo) at BLue Vertigo http:www.bluevertigo.com.ar/

Jaspal February 2nd, 2010 at 6:25 am
Thnx for the list .. i was really in the of finding few free photos … keep it up

Marius February 7th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Great article! I appreciate that you wrote down the licenses usually used on the websites.

Jason February 14th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
thanks so much for this list!
I do want to warn those who may not be aware but there are many images on all these sites that are not TRUE open stock, but simply images taken from other sites and posted. This isn’t a reflection on the site itself, just those who contribute that may not understand what copyright is. So be careful with what you use and how you use it.

Fabricio C Zuardi February 18th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
Nice wrap up! If you plan to write a similar post about stock video footage repositories check it out this under-development project of mine: http://alpha.publicvideos.org there are currently more than 2 thousand clips available, all free footage dedicated to the commons with a CC0 waiver, available in Ogg Theora, Ogg Dirac and H.264 MP4

Shafi Shaikh March 7th, 2010 at 2:38 am
Great place for best photos. I really like these kinds of websites those offer free and good photos.
Great!

Jimmy March 15th, 2010 at 2:48 am
http://www.photospd.com is also a really good resource for public domain photos. It’s a new site so there is new content here and it is always improving.

A Collection of Free Design Resources | Design Reviver April 12th, 2010 at 3:10 am
[...] 12 Amazing And Free Stock Photo Resources [...]

Dez Pain April 21st, 2010 at 6:10 pm
http://www.rgbstock.com/ now has more than 36,000 free photos and graphics for personal and most commercial use. Expanding rapidly.

Paul May 10th, 2010 at 8:34 am
Here is another site for the list free stock photos it is my own site of a growing collection of high quality photos under a CC licence. Thanks.

alexnjoy May 13th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Nice list of websites )) I can ad another one: http://mocii.com/ – mainly about vector graphics, but they also have free stock photos

George June 6th, 2010 at 6:49 am
AbsolutVision also offers a few hundreds free pictures, check here —> http://www.absolutvision.com/AbsolutVisionV2/gallery/free_stock_images

jay June 22nd, 2010 at 2:59 pm
Nice list of websites )) I would like an another one:
http://www.rgbstock.com. More then 41,000 free stock photos online

Allie June 28th, 2010 at 3:16 pm
Of all these above i love sxc.hu most. This list is missing looots of good resources. Like http://www.photl.com and http://www.fotolia.com. I love these as well. They have large collecions as well.

Mike July 6th, 2010 at 12:53 am
well.. as sxc is still the best, sites like fotolia are mainly based on promoting their paid services, than really sharing content..

I am building a large list of these resources – at http://designbeginshere.com

It is classified by type and free/pay.. updating it constantly. Feel free to use it or add to it! Some of the sites listed here are unknown to me, thanks for that! =)

geekers magazine July 31st, 2010 at 2:39 pm
I really like these kinds of websites those offer free and good photos.thnx a lot for compiling them .

img_guy September 3rd, 2010 at 4:36 pm
You can find royalty-free public domain images at:

http://www.TotallyFreeImages.com

They’re all totally free to do with as you please! Enjoy!