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.
EveryStockPhoto – Excellent place 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.
Morgue Files – Don’t be turned off by the name of this one. It refers to the name that newspapers gave to the storage area where they kept files, old stories, photos, etc. In any case, this site offers some really nice photos.
Stock Xchng is a very popular user-contributed source of photos. Definitely bookmark it.
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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And yes, I know there are more than 10 in the list. Consider it lagniappe. 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!
Tags: Bob Nolin, clip art, free pics, free stock photos, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA Photo Library, photos, pics, prettiest site, search engine, search functionality, stock photos, ultimate search engine, US Government
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[...] non-smackdown going out to DazzlinDonna. Kudos, this time for assembling a very nice list of her 10 Favorite Free Stock Photo Download Sites. Very nice list, a must have for anyone who needs image content for their website, or photographers [...]
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An ebusiness coach, web developer, Internet Marketer, SEO, and all around web geek who makes her living from home doing all of the above.
Very nice! Thanks for sharing these.
see also http://www.sxc.hu/
I’m surprised you havn’t got http://www.sxc.hu/ on your list. Its the biggest free stock photo website on the internet.
stock.xchng is really good to…
http://www.sxc.hu/
sxc.hu is best for me
Cool websites!
I found what I looking for!
Thanks a lot!
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.
Don’t forget http://www.photocase.com
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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
Great list. I will be sure to check these out. Try everystockphoto.com, too.
great !
I think i can use it for my wbsite.
thnx
http://www.gelder.tk
its usefull and in a way brillant, I am going to join you in the near future, so
“bonne change: et au revoir
http://www.morguefile.com/
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.
I tried to stumbleupon share this site but it gives page not found error
I’m disapointed not to see morguefile.com to be mentioned.
The yotopho engine, helps to find photo that are not always free.
Umm just to let you know, YoToPhoto searches “Flickr” which is by no means a free photo site or a royalty free photo site.
Yotophoto attempts to only show free photos from Flickr, if my understanding of it is correct, however.
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.
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.
This is a terrific resource, Donna. Thanks so much for sharing – especially Yotophoto (new to me) – a brilliant time-saver!
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..
My guess, Justin, is you probably clicked on an ad.
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.
Thank you for the list. I did a similar list not to long ago. I stumbled this for you.
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
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.
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!
I can add to your list of free photo web sites http://freefoto.ca/ – big collection of photos with keywords search functionality.
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)
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.
Hi,
I like http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/ All pictures are public domain, so there is no copyright on them.
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!
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
Thanks Donna, these are great.
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
Thanks, Bob. Noted, and changed in the post above (with credit to you for the find).
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.
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.
Some of these are not worth the recommendation. I recommend http://www.sxc.hu/. Its worth a try
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!
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.
I would like to recommend another new free stock photo site:
http://www.webphotomart.com
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.
Good article. I’ve wrote an article about dutch stockphoto websites here:
Stockphoto websites
Regards,
Mark
Thanks for the information. May I suggest you also add http://www.sunipix.com
The web site has thousands of high quality free images.
For designers on a shoestring, FreeStockImages.org is new but original and photos are not used much everywhere else so far.
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.
Hey
Can I use your article on my website? I will link back to your site!
Later
@Linewireguy, no, you can’t use my article on your site. Discussing it, and including a small snippet of it is fine, of course. Using it, is not.