Free stock photos to promote your products

  • Are you looking for royalty-free stock photos or images?
  • Do you need an image to throw into a product, presentation, post, or page?
  • Are you looking for an easy starting point in your next search for the “perfect image”?
"That was the thing about pictures -- they were worth a thousand words, but sometimes they weren't the right ones. --Melissa de la Cruz
The right picture is worth a thousand words.

The source of your free stock photos is important

If you use copyrighted images, you can be held legally and financially accountable for using property that isn’t yours. Using someone else’s image without permission is like stealing.

What are the right kinds of free stock photos?

Thankfully, there are standard copyrights that give an informed user a shorthand for understanding if a photo is allowed to be used by them.

For example, “CC0” copyrighted images are free to use (if you credit the owner of the image).

Where to find free stock photos and images

Thanks to paid advertising and misleading copyediting on web sites that sell photos, search engines do a lousy job identifying web sites that offer CC0 and free stock photos.

Here are more than 2 dozen free stock photo sites I’ve found in my research (plus some bonuses).

I’ve sorted the list in roughly the order I’ve found the most value. The sites I use the most are at the top; sites I use less often are toward the bottom. Because each has somewhat different themes and contributors, you may find you have different preferences.

Let me know your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below!

Thanks to everyone who’s shared these with me over the years (see credits at the bottom)!

Free Stock Photos

  1. Public Domain Pictures
  2. Pikwizard.com
  3. pxfuel
  4. unsplash.com
  5. pexels.com
  6. pixabay.com
  7. Google Images (filtering with Tools > License > Labeled for reuse).
  8. pxhere.com
  9. Megan Stewart’s resource list
  10. ThemeIsle.com
  11. rawpixel.com
  12. StockSnap
  13. Take your own
  14. KaboomPics
  15. Libreshot
  16. Negative Space
  17. Life of Pix
  18. ISO Republic
  19. Picjumbo
  20. JESHOOTS.com
  21. https://www.matteoduo.com/free-photo-websites-commercial-use/
  22. www.nappy.co ‘Beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people.’
  23. FancyCrave
  24. DeathtoStock has a really funky “free email pack per month” with their newsletter
  25. Freedigitalphotos.net
  26. AvoPix
  27. Freerange

Free Banner Images

  1. https://www.backgroundimagepro.com/
  2. http://www.linkedinbackground.com/
  3. http://freelinkedinbackgrounds.com/
  4. http://stocksnap.io/ Free 2000 x 1200 photos

Bonus 1: Free stock videos

https://pexels.com/videos

Bonus 2: Free icons

Flaticon

Paid

Fact is, sometimes I can’t find quite the right photo.

Since amazing marketing requires projecting the aspirational future of my prospect, sometimes I need to find just the right photos of the right people in the right situations having the right experiences. Here are the sites I’ve used so far, when all else fails:

Images

Icons

Give Credit Where Credit Is Due:

Offer proper attribution for the source of the photo.

Share your sources of free and CC0 images and photos in comments below.

Many thanks to the following for your contributions to the above:

Photo credit: https://quotefancy.com/fun-quotes

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