DazzlinDonna » Favorite 10 Free Stock Photo Download Sites

Favorite 10 Free Stock Photo Download Sites

Need a free stock photo? Free … meaning you don’t have to pay anyone cold, hard cash for its use? Look no further. I’ve compiled my top 10 list of favorite stock photo sites that don’t cost you anything. Make sure you read any terms of usage, however, as you may need to attribute its source via a link or mention.

If you need to return, bookmark this page at del.icio.us for quick reference.

EveryStockPhoto – Thanks to Bob Nolin for pointing out that Yotophoto is no longer in service, but EveryStockPhoto is an excellent replacement for searching multiple sites for just the right pic. It also includes some nice social aspects allowing everyone to rate and tag photos. I’ll be using this one a lot from now on.

Yotophoto – This is the first place I usually turn to because Yotophoto is the ultimate search engine for finding free use photos across the entire web. It searches some sites that I don’t include in this list, simply because you’ll find them via Yotophoto. (Yotophoto appears to be no longer in service).

UPDATE: Everyone thought I was crazy for not including Stock Xchng and Morgue Files because I find them via Yotophoto, but who am I to question the masses, so those are now linked here as well.
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Image*After – Has a nice collection of photos and textures, with good search functionality.
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Photogen – Nice collection of good quality photos.
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Free Digital Photos – Good quality photos for free, although their best quality pics come with a charge.
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NOAA Photo Library – This is just one example of the many photos you can use for free from the US Government sites. You’ll find more listed at the directory at the bottom of this list. This batch contains some amazing oceanic and atmospheric photos.
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BurningWell – Not the prettiest site in the bunch, but so what? It’s got what you need – free use photos.
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Backgrounds Archive – Pretty photos. Big photos. Pretty and big photos. What more can I say?
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PD Photo – Lots of travel and country-specific photos, along with some more general categories too.
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Public Domain Photos – Claims to be the largest collection of public domain photos. It also has clip art.
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WP Clipart – Speaking of clip art this site has lots of clip art to choose from, with some photos as well.
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Uncle Sam’s Photos – As promised up above, this is a nice directory listing more of the U.S. Government’s repositories of free to use photos.
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If you can’t find the image you need from one of the above places, it just might not exist! Good luck, and happy photo hunting!

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Posted on July 18th, 2007 by DazzlinDonna
Filed under: Nice Photos

84 Responses to “Favorite 10 Free Stock Photo Download Sites”

Michael VanDeMar

Very nice! Thanks for sharing these.

on July 18th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
logu

see also http://www.sxc.hu/

on July 19th, 2007 at 2:58 am
Duncan

I’m surprised you havn’t got http://www.sxc.hu/ on your list. Its the biggest free stock photo website on the internet.

on July 19th, 2007 at 3:11 am
Kenneth Jones

stock.xchng is really good to…

http://www.sxc.hu/

on July 19th, 2007 at 4:39 am
MrSteel

sxc.hu is best for me

on July 19th, 2007 at 4:46 am
Fe. K�s

Cool websites!

I found what I looking for!

Thanks a lot!

on July 19th, 2007 at 4:55 am
DazzlinDonna

You are all very right about sxc, but that’s one that Yotophoto covers very well, so I didn’t see the point in listing it. In fact, imo, search is quicker and better via Yotophoto than directly from sxc.

on July 19th, 2007 at 6:25 am
Pedro

Don’t forget http://www.photocase.com

on July 19th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Patricia - Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker

Donna, thanks for the photo sources. This is one thing I still need to learn how to do to add to the look of my blog.

on July 19th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Patricia - Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker

I love your “emerging from the cocoon to break free” and your butterfly is beautiful. When I am finished with my blog, I want a butterfly and an eagle on it. The butterfly for transformation and the eagle for freedom, flying high above the world and being able to see the bigger picture from up high. Great site.

on July 19th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
Sugar

I disagree to that bit about sxc.hu.

Yotophoto does not have a way of sorting the images and since most of its images come from flickr, there’s no real way of sorting through the junk there.

Sxc.hu is the best stock site out there, in my humble opinion. Sporting a huge community too, it’s not that difficult to find any picture you want.

on July 20th, 2007 at 1:10 am
moonliter

The ones I liked at Imageafter looked like they were not free.They said you need to register and then you can have the picture as low as .26. I realize that’s not much but your links said free , so what gives?

on July 20th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
DazzlinDonna

No idea, moonliter. I haven’t experienced that. I just click on the little download photo button above each pic to get ‘em. They’ve all been free, without me ever registering.

on July 20th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Christi

Great collection of photo sites! I also use http://www.sxc.hu/ for most of my photos, but on my http://www.bloggingmthood.com site I take nearly all of the photos myself. It just depends on what type of pics a person needs, but when I can’t find certain photos, I’ll now check out the ones you mentioned here! Thanks again!

on July 21st, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Christian

http://commons.wikimedia.org – not stock photos per se, but still. There’s a gazillion images of anything and everything, some even in public domain.

on July 22nd, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Garcya

Also a web design blog that offers free vector graphics is http://www.Garcya.us/blog ! Every day are added a set of 3 vector graphics for download. Example here http://garcya.us/blog/free-vector-graphics/ !
Enjoy

on July 23rd, 2007 at 10:57 am
LOR3N

Great list. I will be sure to check these out. Try everystockphoto.com, too.

on July 23rd, 2007 at 12:15 pm
www.gelder.tk

great !
I think i can use it for my wbsite.
thnx

http://www.gelder.tk

on July 24th, 2007 at 10:36 am
hoezodekey

its usefull and in a way brillant, I am going to join you in the near future, so
“bonne change: et au revoir

on July 29th, 2007 at 5:04 am
J

http://www.morguefile.com/

on July 30th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
DazzlinDonna

Again, I agree with morguefile, but it’s also one that YotoPhoto does a good job of pulling from, which is why I didn’t mention it either.

on July 30th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Sachin

I tried to stumbleupon share this site but it gives page not found error

on August 2nd, 2007 at 2:56 am
mehdi

I’m disapointed not to see morguefile.com to be mentioned.
The yotopho engine, helps to find photo that are not always free.

on August 5th, 2007 at 8:24 am
dfrag

Umm just to let you know, YoToPhoto searches “Flickr” which is by no means a free photo site or a royalty free photo site.

on August 6th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
DazzlinDonna

Yotophoto attempts to only show free photos from Flickr, if my understanding of it is correct, however.

on August 6th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Elwyn Jenkins

This list actually needs to be downsized to just the five best sites. Some of these are not worth the recommendation. SO recommending the best five would make the usefulness of this list improve.

on August 6th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Stock Photos New Zealand

We have a number of $1 stock images from in and round New Zealand – you have put together a very good list tho, and that will be a lot of use to people. Well done.

on August 9th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Jen / domestika

This is a terrific resource, Donna. Thanks so much for sharing – especially Yotophoto (new to me) – a brilliant time-saver!

on August 13th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Justin

Maybe I did something wrong but sxc.hu took me to a site where I had to purchase credits to download. They didn’t before. Maybe I clicked on the wrong thing..

on August 31st, 2007 at 8:49 pm
DazzlinDonna

My guess, Justin, is you probably clicked on an ad.

on August 31st, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Jen / domestika

Or on a photo in the last row, maybe, Jason? The last row of photos on any sxc.hu results page is the ’stockexpert’ photos, which are paid. All the upper rows are the free ones.

on September 1st, 2007 at 3:06 am
Rose

Thank you for the list. I did a similar list not to long ago. I stumbled this for you.

on September 8th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Stefan Witte - Image*After

to Moonliter:
I think you have mistakenly clicked on one of our advertisers and interpreted their site as ours. Images and textures on Image*After are always totally free and hi-res (1200×1600 minimum).

to DazzlinDonna:
Great article – and thanx for using/mentioning us

on September 13th, 2007 at 1:28 am
photodesign

You can get thousands of high res photos for free at Freerange Stock – http://www.freerangestock.com, and if you’re a photographer you can participate in Google AdSense revenue sharing.

on September 24th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
kennygadams

Thanks for putting this list together. I found it to be a great resource! Check out http://www.HistoricalStockPhotos.com – They have put together about 75 different galleries that feature only historic pictures. They are all free!

on December 10th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Helen

I can add to your list of free photo web sites http://freefoto.ca/ – big collection of photos with keywords search functionality.

on December 19th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
john

Hi

This site has thousands of cost free large graphics including photos,illustrations,logos,fractals and textures all for immediate free download.

http://www.freegraphicscentre,com

Absolutelly free link back not required (but would be nice)- don’t have to join unless you want a lightbox (no cost)

on April 18th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Julieanne van Zyl

Thanks so much Donna, I’m glad your site came up high in the search engines when I was looking for some images. Very useful information here. I’m going to put a link to this site on mine.

on April 29th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
JohnK

Hi,

I like http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/ All pictures are public domain, so there is no copyright on them.

on May 8th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Husac

Hi!
You can use my photos for free at http://freeartisticphotos.com – all of them are taken by me and made Public Domain ; hope you enjoy them!

Cheers, Husac!

on May 16th, 2008 at 3:42 am
Roger Thomas

I just recently launched a new website called Your Stock Photography Source, which is a collection of photos that you are free to use in any project. All the photos featured on the website were taken by myself.

You can view my website online at http://www.ysps.info

on May 23rd, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Nik

Thanks Donna, these are great.

on June 23rd, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Bob Nolin

Donna –

Nice list, though it looks like Yotophoto is down or out of business. I found this site, though, and it does what Yotophoto did/does:

http://www.everystockphoto.com/

You might want to check it out. 3 million images indexed! Wow.

Cheers -
Bob Nolin

on June 24th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
DazzlinDonna

Thanks, Bob. Noted, and changed in the post above (with credit to you for the find).

on June 24th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Chance Agrella

On that note, my site, http://www.freerangestock.com, was well indexed by yotophoto, but is only about 5% indexed by everystockphoto.com (we’re working on this), so the thousands of Freerange images can only be searched at the site.

Thanks Donna.

on June 24th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
ck

Donna, you have some great articles. Thanks for your efforts and time. I read some and will be reading most of them.

I have a new website with categorized free (personal or commercial use) photo sets at:

http://www.creativekitten.com/

I thought some of them at least may be use of some people.

on July 3rd, 2008 at 9:20 am
maingi

Some of these are not worth the recommendation. I recommend http://www.sxc.hu/. Its worth a try

on August 5th, 2008 at 1:14 am
Rebecca

Hi. I just googled ‘free stock photography’ and found you straight away, and I’m so glad I did. There are some great sites here, and they’re just what I need. Great work, thank you!

on August 11th, 2008 at 3:58 am
Ted

May i suggest http://sweetstockphoto.com? It’s a small but growing archive of free stock photos released under public domain license, meaning you can use them in whatever you want – even in commersial projects.

on September 3rd, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Bmiller

I would like to recommend another new free stock photo site:

http://www.webphotomart.com

on September 21st, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Theodor

Thanks! Got most of them in my own list, my favorite is sxc – useful and easy to use.

To add from myself, recently found another free stock images website with conceptual collections: http://co-photo.com/

They are creative commons licensed.

on February 24th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
stockphoto

Good article. I’ve wrote an article about dutch stockphoto websites here:

Stockphoto websites

Regards,
Mark

on March 5th, 2009 at 8:43 am
Ryan

Thanks for the information. May I suggest you also add http://www.sunipix.com

The web site has thousands of high quality free images.

on March 12th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Stockimage

For designers on a shoestring, FreeStockImages.org is new but original and photos are not used much everywhere else so far.

on April 26th, 2009 at 4:29 am
matthew

Great collection of stock photo sites in one place, I am bookmarking this for reference. I have only used a couple of these so it is great to hear of other sites that are recommended. Thanks.

on June 3rd, 2009 at 6:48 pm