Top tips on where to find the best stock photos for free
Need something to make your blog post stand out? Read on to find a list of the best stock photos that are all completely free
When you’ve spent hours crafting your latest blog post you want it to be awesome. The best way to transform a blog post from ordinary to epic is to illustrate it and give it life. Blog posts with images get 94% more views than those without. After all it’s true that a picture can tell a thousand words. A eye catching picture will attract more people to click on your post and it’s more likely to appeal in your most popular articles where more people will see it. Whilst there are many sites out there that charge for images this can get very expensive in the long run. I’m a massive fan of free stock photo sites that allow you to download royalty free images from a huge variety of topics. Whilst you won’t find images for everything you’ll probably find something pretty close. All of the sites are ones I have been using for a few years and really help bring my posts to life. Find out more on where to find the best stock photos all for free.
Pexels
You can find images on Pexels for a large range of topics including animals, weather, food, cars and lots more. It doesn’t have a huge amount of images relating to makeup and beauty which is a little annoying if your blog is a beauty niche. It’s very easy to search for images and navigate the site.
Picjumbo
Picjumbo offers collections for both free and paid users. You can search by categories or through keywords on topics like technology, holidays, fashion, food and drink etc. The collections are a lot smaller so you may not find what you’re looking for on this site. Some photos are also put into a category they may not fit into, for example I found makeup photos in the fashion category.
Pixabay
Pixabay has both free images and videos for you to illustrate your blog posts with. The photos subjects are very varied with images on things like nature, sunsets, animals, insects etc. This is another site that is not overly specific so you may not find images for niche posts but most topics are covered.
Morguefile
Whilst Morguefile has quite a few images to choose from, finding them is quite haphazard. Photos can only be found by a search and your search may not always match the results you get. For example I typed in beauty and got results like flowers, cats, fields and more. Only a few images slightly related to what I would expect from beauty imagery. There are also free videos available.
Stock Snap.io
Stock snap has images available on things like business, nature, beauty, animals, computers and more. There are a lot of photos so it’s definitely worth narrowing your search by using the search box.
Makerbook
Makerbook is a little different to a traditional stock photo site as it sources images from 30+ stock sites. Categories include people, computers, smartphones, technology etc. You can’t really search for images on this site so it’s quite tricky to navigate and requires a lot of scrolling.
Unsplash
Unsplash is one of my favourite photo stock sites as there’s so many images available. Typing in beauty alone will get you over 25,000 results. You can search by categories or keywords – the latter is probably the easiest way to find the image you want. Images are pretty broad but there is the odd specific topic you may not find images on.
Rawpixel
Rawpixel has images for both free and paid. The free selection of image is very large and can only be found through a keyword search. Like the other sites there are images available for a large amount of subjects like animals, beauty, nature etc.
You may find some of the images you find on one site are duplicated on another; this is probably down to the creator submitting photos to more then one site. Another issue you may find is that images you’ve used may pop up on other people’s sites. Whilst there are a few issues with free stock sites these are minor and they are a great way to illustrate and bring to life your posts.
