8 Free Stock Image Websites For your Blog

So you’re building a new blog for your business and you take a step back. It’s lacking something isn’t it? It just looks kind of….bland. Like something’s missing. That feeling when looking at a white wall without a painting. The same thing happens when you build a fresh blog sometimes and have too much white space or too much text.

That’s why we use images to spice up the atmosphere of your funnel. But where do we find them? Today I’ll show you some places you can find stock images for your website.

1. Unsplash (Free)

Unsplash is a great website to get your stock photos from for your blog posts. They post primarily landscapes from around the world which look breathtakingly awesome and would work extremely well as a background for your landing page too. They upload 10 new photos every 10 days.

If you want to use images from Unsplash in your blog posts you won’t even need to leave attribution if you don’t want to:

All photos published on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.

2. Kaboompics (Free)

Kaboompics is another fantastic resource with hundreds of photos at your disposal. Run by Karolina Grabowska from Poland, she covers a variety of categories like:

• Landscapes
• Abstract
• Fashion
• Food
• City & Architecture
• Other

They’re very flexible in what you can do with their photos too with their requirements being:

You can do nearly anything with the images, commercial or not. For example you can use photos for client works, HTML/PSD templates (for sale), in articles, Power Point presentations, print on t-shirts. Also you can distribute my PSD files with photos included in design. Attribution greatly appreciated.

3. Pixabay (Free)

Pixabay is a personal favourite of mine which has a huge library of images (over 490,000 free photos, vectors and art illustrations). There’s been multiple times where I’ve gone to this website to pick up a stock photo which sometimes turned out to be even better than the ones I’ve paid for.

As for their attribution rules:

All images and videos on Pixabay are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0. You may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty-free for anything you like, even in commercial applications. Attribution is not required.

When you get to Pixabay I’d start by heading to the top right of the page where it says “Explore” then select “Editor’s Choice” in the dropdown menu.

I always seem to find golden nuggets which can be used in blog posts amongst the mountains of text. Obviously if you want to use an image specifically for a point you’re making the search bar is the best but they can be great for featured images of your blog posts too alongside a converting headline.

4. PhotoDune (Paid: From $1)

PhotoDune is one of my favourite paid stock photo websites when it comes to my resources. What I’m looking for when I use stock photos is:

• High quality images which are relevant to what I’m writing my blog posts
• Affordable image prices
• Easy to add funds/credits to purchase images

They have a really good range of images, everything from fitness to marketing images. If you select larger image sizes, you’ll pay higher prices for the photo, but for images on blogs you’re not looking for anything super large. As for their attribution you their regular licence includes:

Multiple end products, distributed free by you or one client, up to 250,000 copies (unlimited for web). The total price includes the item price and a buyer fee.

5. Canva (Paid: $1 Per Photo)

Canva is one of the most used design platforms for marketers for all kinds of images, everything from Facebook Ads to cover photos and flyers. But what most people don’t know is it can just as easily be used for stock photos.

You can use your stock photos within your designs in Canva or you can use the on a white page and export them straight away.They’ve got over a million stock photos which you can use and take advantage of in your blog.

Their attribution makes it easy to understand:

We are granting you a license anywhere we can (even Antarctica, penguins!), but you’re not the only one we can give it to and you can’t give it to anyone else.

6. BigStock (Paid: Packaged Pricing, $1-5)

BigStock is another great stock photo resource which contains over 28 million stock photos, videos, and vectors in their library. Pretty comprehensive hey?

The beauty of having such a large inventory of photos on their website is if you’re looking for something specific they’ll generally be able to help you out with what you’re looking for. The downside is you can’t turn up and purchase photos one by one like some of the other alternatives in this list (so if you don’t use stock photos often this might be a deal breaker).

So what’s their attribution like?

Bigstock images are provided under a royalty-free license, which lets you use them almost any way you please.

7. FancyCrave (Free)

FancyCrave reminds me of the ‘hip’ stock image place which always has something cool floating around you wished you would’ve used in a previous blog post. With a couple of images being added daily and completely free it’s a nice little website to have in your rollerdex when you want to find images to use.

One really cool addition to the website which caught my eye when I first started using it was their ‘photo packs’ area which is great if you want to download a collection of pics from a specific theme. For those packs they use a ‘name your price’ system and you’re good to go 🙂

Their attribution is as follows:

Photographs are provided free of charge and under the Creative Commons Public Domain CC0 licence

8. Gratisography (Free)

Gratisography (which is an awesome name for a stock image site, and his logo is even cooler) is put together by Ryan McGuire who has amounted a really nice collection of images you can use throughout your posts.

He’s got a nice mix of animals, nature, people, objects, urban and whimsical on the site which look fantastic. His images would also do really well for a slide deck in a webinar too!

His attribution rules are:

Free high-resolution pictures you can use on your personal and commercial projects.
Click on an image to download the high-resolution version. New awesome pictures added weekly!

Millions of Photos At Your Fingertips…

Now that you know where to find your stock photos it’s time to go hunting for the right ones to use in your blog posts to really make them pop. One way to have people stick on your website and consume your content is by keeping them visually entertained and a good eye grabbing stock photo could be exactly what you’re looking for.

If you know any other great stock photo websites that you’d love to share with our community, don’t be afraid to drop the link in the comments below. I’d love to see what they have to offer.