“A picture is worth a thousand words” – almost everyone is familiar with this phrase and the phrase is true to the much extent. There are millions of incredible, inspiring photos available over the internet. Apart from the fun of searching or browsing these pictures, you can use them to enhance your blog posts, designs and presentations. A picture can promote almost everything that you create. No matter how good your text could be, a good picture always increases the perception of the website or post. If you are a webmaster in search of great images to add to your site, or a web designer in search of photos then you must know some of the Top Stock Photo Sites for getting Free Photos. You do not require hours of internet browsing for your images, as we are here to help you with a list of some of the top free stock photo sites having a great stock of images.
1. Stock.xchng
SXC is one of the biggest and popular free stock photo sites. Launched in February 2001 by Peter Hamza, the site allows users to share, contribute and download high-resolution photos. It has a great community and a long history. This site offers an impressive collection of many high quality photos taken by many amateur photographers around the world. People can also share their photos here. There are more than 390,000 quality stock photos contributed by more than 30,000 photographers. If you are searching for some good images, this is the first place to search for. Searching and browsing is very easy here and they also include a lightbox – a simple way to save images to be used later. The image license is fairly moderate and the photos are free, however people who wish to include the images in their work are suggested to contact the photographers for permission.
2. Flickr
Flickr is an online community for image sharing that was created by Ludicorp in the year 2004 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Apart from being a popular website for users to download and share personal photos, the site is widely used by bloggers to download images that they attach in their blogs and social media. This is one of the leading choices for almost everyone to search for really great stock of free photos. It is the best place to search for unique images from both amateurs and professionals alike. The Flickr API enables the users to view, manipulate, and search for photo tags, retrieve tags to create URLs to a photo group or some specific photos, display photos from a specific user or group. It also provides an Authentication API for applications that require performing restricted actions. Most of the photos available here are copyrighted. If you want free photos, then visit the creative commons section. It contains lots of photos that are free to use.
3. MorgueFile
MorgueFile is a website for free high resolution stock photos and reference images for both corporate and public use. The name of the site comes from the term “morgue file”, which is generally used for a stockpile of photos used for reference purpose. The intention of the site is to provide free image reference material for designers, comic book artists, illustrators, teachers and all creative professionals. Despite its weird name, MorgueFile offers royalty free photos, stored in 11 different categories. The site offers paid premium accounts and VIP services too.
4. OpenPhoto
OpenPhoto is a creation of Jaisen Mathai, who left his job as an engineer working for Yahoo to follow the cloud app project. It is a stock photo gallery started in 1998 and has developers, artists, students and teachers as primary audience. The website groups their photos by categories, and offers a search feature too. It includes 27 different categories with high quality photos. Registration is not required for downloading a photo. However registration is required to upload your photos. Next to each image, the license terms are listed and most of the images can be copied by the user. It allows the user to store photos, tags and comments into their cloud storage account such as Dropbox, Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud files. The users can easily upload, search and share their photos through Email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Also the site is an open source project, so a web programmer can develop any photo sharing applications using OpenPhoto codes.
5. Stockvault
In the year 2004 Bjorgvin Gudmundsson a graphic designer and photography enthusiast, started Stockvault.net as his personal stock gallery. Later on Stockvault became a very classy and modern website with thousands of images and some Photoshop tutorials. Here designers, photographers and students can share their photographs and images with each other. The purpose of Stockvault is to collect and archive high and medium resolution images that people can share and use for their personal and commercial designs. You do not require a registration to download free stock images. A very big collection of about 11,000 high quality stock photos are available both free and for sale, in different categories again. The Membership of the site is free and has some additional features like a lightbox.
6. Everystockphoto
Launched in April 2006, the website is owned and operated by Vibrant Software and located in Vancouver, Canada. It is an amazing website that acts like a search engine for free images. Wikipedia, NASA, Flickr and many other websites are the sources of these photos. You can search for images by entering a keyword to search or browse them by category. The search results are shown as thumbnail with the right image dimensions shown below. By placing the mouse pointer over an icon under the thumbnail, you can quickly view the license details of the image. Clicking on the image takes you to the Every Stock Photo page of the image where the registered users can rate the image and leave comments on it. You can also view the image in its original dimensions and see the details of the image like photographer name and date. Membership of the site is free.
7. Freestockphotos.biz
Freestockphotos.biz is one of the leading websites for clip art illustrations and free stock photos. The site includes a collection of more than 14,000 Free Stock images and Clip Art images, including creative commons and public domain and custom agreements. All these images are absolutely free to use and download. The user does not need an account to download these photos. However each time the user downloads an image, he/she has to agree with the terms and restrictions given on the site.
8. DeviantART
Founded on August 7, 2000 by Matthew Stephens, Scott Jarkoff, Angelo Sotira and others, deviantArt, Inc. is headquartered in the Los Angeles, California, United States. It is an online community including various types of user-made artwork. It is one of the biggest online social networks for artists with more than 19 million registered members and attracts about 45 million unique visitors every month. It has a collection of gorgeous images with good image resolution. You do not need to register to download these images. However you have to check for the license and ask the authors first for permission before downloading the images. deviantART is a platform, which allows emerging and established artists to show, endorse, and share their art works within a community dedicated to the art. The site receives over 100,000 uploads of original art works daily, ranging from traditional media to digital art, pixel art, anime and films. The art works are organized in many categories including photography, traditional art, digital art, flash, literature, film making, skins for applications and others, along with widespread downloadable resources like stock photography and tutorials. Additional utilities include polls, journals, groups and portfolios.
9. PhotoRack
All photos available on PhotoRack are free to use for personal as well as commercial projects. Photo Rack stores more than 30,000 images, which are easily divided into some categories like “travel,” “life style,” “people,” “animals,” “cooking,””wallpapers”, “nature”, “business,” “sports,” ”miscellaneous,” etc. The images are very easy to search. Registration is not required to download the images. The site does not provide an ability to upload images, however downloading an image is very simple.
10. Freerange
Freerange is a website with a huge collection of high quality stock images. All images available here are at least 2400 x 1600 and these images can be used for personal and commercial projects. Before downloading an image, you need to sign up. After that you can download as many images as you wish. Although there are no categories for browsing the images, there is a search function available. Here you can find the images very easily. The site offers a free-to-join membership. The site also invites you to make requests, as it has many photos that are not online yet. The photographers are rewarded for giving their images for free by getting a share of the ad revenue of the website. So you get free photos and the photographers still get paid.
