This is the most extensive list of free stock image sites.

We analysed hundreds of sites to better understand where you can get the best free images for websites or your next design project.

Specifically we looked at the resolution quality, uniqueness and authentication that drives emotion and engagement.

We found some really great sites…

And I’m sure you will find some hidden gems amongst them.

Redefining traditional stock imagery, Igor Trepeshchenok and Roman Drits are the creators of Barn Images.

Accomplished photographers, you will find high quality photography that’s unique and fresh with no image that’s a duplicate from standard stock photography found elsewhere.

A platform and community of travellers and adventures that are encourage to share their life stories to the world.

With a goal to inspire and motivate people to travel and live the life of their dreams, the platform provides a collection of over 5000 travel photos from all over the world.

Shopify’s new free stock photography resource offering all images completely royalty free, under the Creative Commons Zero licence. 

The purpose of the site is to inspire and empower designers and bloggers to develop visually stunning websites and advertising campaigns.

There is a Business Idea’s section that inspire startup ecommerce businesses with case studies on trending niches to help with identifying popular products that are relatively easy to create or distribute via drop shipping platforms.

High quality and unique photography by Jonas Wimmerström (former Nilsson Lee).

His website offers beautiful images for use with commercial projects under the Creative Commons (CCO) license.

Dave Sherry, founder of Death To Stock had a vision to provide a platform and build a community around visual content.

Death To Stock strives to help designers with their visual content needs by providing free, inspirational images and resources.

Collaborating with photographers and artists, the community delivers on inspiring photos, videos and creatives for users when developing their own campaigns, projects and designs.

Unique photography images made available for free to use by Daria.

As a visual and UX designer, Daria designs landing pages and web prototypes to test various business ideas and to collect feedback.

With that, photo’s made for these projects appear on his Tumblr page for personal and commercial use.

Looking for images that are authentic, emotionally driven and tell a story? Look no further than Fancy Crave.

Created by Igor Ovsyannykov, Fancy Crave is a free stock photo site that showcases images from his travels around Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Laos, Japan, Nepal and many other countries.

Everyday, Igor publishes two high resolution photos to help designers, students, bloggers and marketers wishing to convey a message with their visual content.

For all you food loving people and bloggers alike, FoodiesFeed is a resource of unique high quality and naturally looking food photos that are completely free to download.

Created to eliminate the sterile and somewhat fake looking stock food photos, FoodiesFeed is all about providing resources & community to help designers and bloggers in the food niche source beautifully presented images.

With over 900,000 downloads to date, this site is sure to impress.

Free Images is a source of high quality digital stock photography for use by all. Images from this site can be used in projects spanning websites, printed materials and anywhere in between.

Perfect for design teams in creatives, FreeImages is part of a network of free stock photography related resources.

Unique photos can be hard to come by, however this site is yet another we have found that provides high quality images using professional gear.

Creator Adrian Pelletier personally captures all of the photos showcased and adds a new image daily. If your looking for unique photos of landscape, ocean and sky, then be sure to stop by Free Nature Stock.

Free Range Photos are produced directly by in-house photographers or they’re contributed by a growing community of creative & talented photographers.

A community platform that credits photographers with advertising revenue from clickable ads appearing next to their submission.

With categories including animals, architecture, interiors, health through to military, sports and transportation you are bound to find an image to fit into your design specs.

Many people will make purchase decisions based on their emotions, and Getrefe images will help to provide the positive emotions that lead them to taking action.

Their mission is quite simple. ”We are here to help organisations and individuals bring ideas to life in a memorable way.

We provide high-quality imagery of people interacting with technology for your projects.”

For images that portray emotion and help to engage your audience, then Getrefe may just have the image for you.

Goof Free Photos is a web gallery of thousands of high quality and unique free public domain photos.

You can find travel photos, images of animals, plants and objects. Travel photos are categorises by locations and others are by species and types.

All photos are copyright free and royalty free.

Free high resolution images perfect for personal and commercial projects.

Fresh new photos are added weekly. Gratisography is a site by Ryan McGuire and all photos are taken by him.

Ryan is a visual creator and designer that loves taking pictures and where possible tries to add humour into his creative work.

A curated collection of free web design images and resources, IM Free is all about making website building a simple and enjoyable experience.

With design templates, images and icons the collection is high quality easing the confusion and complications of finding great design elements for your next creative project.

ISO Republic is a source of free stock photos for creative professionals.

Founded in 2014 by Tom Eversley, a designer and photographer himself, the site now boasts over 1500 free images with more consistently added on a daily basis.

Web designers, bloggers and marketing teams all use the high resolution images that are free for use on your personal and commercial creative designs.

Photographers can also now contribute images to their gallery.

“Designer by day and burger monster by night”, Jay Mantri from Santa Monica, California captures stunning photos which as stated by Dave Neal have a serene and beautiful approach capturing the moment with true care and emotion. 

One of the things Jay found in the design world was great photography that could be used on a clients project and so it led him to start a little project for fun where he would upload photos every week and let designers use them as much as they want.

While Kaboompicks is “one woman show”, creator Karolina says “there is no chance I could have done all this without a little help from my friends.”

With over 80.000 people from 209 countries visiting Kaboompics, a royalty-free service for stock images.

Kaboompics is rated as one of the most popular sources of free images for lifestyle, interior design and specialised bloggers.

To this day the site has gathered over 6 million impressions, and the photos have been downloaded over 4 million times.

Libreshot is a project by Martin Vorel.  All the photos found on his site are original and natural looking.

Licensed with a CC0 – public domain, Martins images are perfect for web design, business and marketing material through to news articles and flyers.

“An awesome community of photographers is here to share with you their best shots.”

Everyday you can discover a fine selection with a featured section of photographer of the week. New photographers are added every week and all images are donated to the public domain.

Every week a photographer is elected as the Life Of Pix photographer of the week by their team. 10 photographers are then highlighted on the Life Of Pix social media networks and website.

Perhaps one of sadness as this site was a project created by Nic Jackson.

Nic with a zest for life suddenly passed away in 2013, though his family still maintain Little Visuals.

With this in mind Nic’s family would like to ask when you view his site and/or download the images if you would consider a small donation towards the Hand on Heart Charity.  A link can be found on the Little Visuals website.

Sign up to Little Visuals emails and get 7 high resolution images to your inbox.

Magdeleine.co is a curated blog that features the best hand-picked free high-quality stock photography for your inspiration.

Images sourced from photographers, Magdeleine showcases a unique featured image daily.

Jeffery Betts, founder of MMT Stock launched this site in 2014 to share his love of photography to the world.

Over the years Jeffery has taken countless photos and wanted to post some of them to use for free and give back to the online community.

The creative span across many categories, including nature, city scenes, workspaces, and macro photography. Images from his site can be freely downloaded, used, and redistributed for both personal and commercial purposes.

Morguefile is a free photo archive for creatives, by creatives. Founded by Michael Connors in the 1996, the site was created to serve as a free image exchange for creative professionals and teachers to use in their design projects.

This same mission remains true today. “We are a community-based free photo site, and all photos found in the Morguefile archive are free for you to download and re-use in your work, be it commercial or not.

The photos have been contributed by a wide range of creatives from around the world, ranging from amateur photo hobbyists to professionals.”

Designers and creative are encouraged to upload images that they have taken in return of favour for downloading the images from this site.

This is a journey of a Portuguese guy moving that decided that every photo should be used for free. Help yourselves and use them wherever you want (CC0).

Creator of Moveast João Pacheco decided he wanted a place to keep track of his experiences/travels and also to encourage/inspire people to travel and to move.

A curated list of beautiful free stock photos made by the team that can be used for personal or commercial design projects.

Beautiful, free high resolution photos with no restrictions. Negative Space is about creating communities.

A platform building a community of photographers who want to share their work.

It’s also a place where a community of online visitors, designers and creatives can use their beautiful, free high-resolution images without any restrictions.

Each of the high-quality photographs you find has been taken by a photographer from the Negative Space community. There is something for everybody, so be sure to check out their portfolio.

Categories include Abstract, Animals, Architecture, Business, Black & White, Food, Landscapes, Nature, People, Sport, Street, Technology, Transport, and Work.

Vintage photos from the public archives. All images are free of known copyright restrictions.

Timeless photography recapturing history.

Empowering Creators. Pexels provides free stock photos to help millions of design creators all over the world to easily create stunning digital products and designs.

Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos under the CC0 license.

The site is easy to navigate and all images are tagged and easy to discover. There are currently over 30,000 free stock images and every month at least 3,000 new high resolution images are added.

Pexels is just about our first port of call for every one of our own in house web design projects.

Free photos for bloggers and creatives! PhotoPin helps bloggers find photos for their blog by using their search function to find topic related photos. 

PhotoPin uses the Flickr API to search for creative Commons photos to use on any blog project.

Creator of Photo Stock Editor, Javier Palmieri is a web designer who loves to take photos.  Free high-resolution images for use how you like. New images are added weekly.

Photographer Vadim Goncharov began Photocollections to provide and inspire designers with unique high quality images. Categories include animals, industrial, landscapes, nature, people, transportation

Picjumbo is a free stock photo site created by designer & photographer Viktor Hanacek.

Quite astoundingly he began this project when regular stock photo sites would not take his photos due to lack of quality. Now 4 years later more than 5 million images have been downloaded from his site. 

With a growing premium membership base of over 2000 people, Picjumbo images are at the top our own go to sources for high quality images.

Picography.co allows people to use any of the photos on the website for whatever they want, free of charge, no catches.

With over 100,000 visitors per month, the site is serving images that are unique from anywhere else.

Featured in many top marketing & business articles like Forbes & Life Hack, Picography is in our top 5 resources for high quality & unique images.

Almost 7 years ago, Pixabay was started as an image source for the authors of Wizzley.com and Pagewizz.com – two international micro blogging platforms.

Fast forward to today and there are over half million photos, vector graphics, art illustrations and videos. Latest developments from Pixabay this year include their Mobile App.

Featuring fast search, swipe through search results, direct download and much more. If we had to choose our top free stock image site…Pixabay would be it.

Vintage and modern public domain images. Everything you need for creative projects with a large variety of vintage images added frequently.

Raumrot is a free commercial use image resource platform with stunning lifestyle imagery for modern creatives.

With over 1000 photos to chose from sectors including business, technic, transport through to xmas, muscle cars and travel.

Please note: most Raumrot images require author attribution with a link back to the original author.

A small collection of frees tock photos for all projects. New photos are added daily. No royalties, no fees, no worries.

Skitterphoto was launched in 2014 by amateur photographers Rudy and Peter from the Netherlands.

They felt it was hard to find high quality images and thought why not publish our own collection. Soon after they witnessed their own photos being used across the globe which led to more motivation to make better photos.

Now photographers from all over can upload their own images to the revamped site.

7 free beautiful photos every 7 days.  A collection of unique photos from over 200,000 of the worlds most talented photographers.

SpaceX is a private company founded in 2002 by CEO and Lead Designer Elon Musk. SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft.

The website has hundreds of stunning space & rocket themed images for download.

Splitshire came about with the simple aim of giving life to photographs that otherwise would have gone into oblivion. There mission is to help you be awesome out there with great content.

Across the course of ten years taking unique high quality photography, Daniel Nanescuhese accumulated many thousands of images that were just gathering digital dust.

Nowadays these images are being used across many high authority sites like Huffington Post, CNN and popular magazines across the world.

Free tech photos for startups, bloggers, publishers and creatives. The creators of Startup Stock Photos hopes the project continues to be helpful, and serve as a positive representation of the world of tech today.

StockSnap credits themselves as being the best place on the internet to find beautiful free stock photos.

The site is a curation of the highest quality and highest resolution images from around the web.

Select photographers from their own network have photos featured providing an high quality repository of beautiful stock photography.

Just over a year ago, Ed Gregory decided to start giving away his photos fro free.

As a photographer who takes hundreds perhaps thousands of photos, many of which would go unnoticed. A site that began as a little weekend project soon started to generate a lot of interest and appreciation from followers.

Ed now photographs specifically for Stokpic to ensure high quality photos for his subscribers.

The Pic Pac is a free stock image website with a little twist. Mat Jones set out to establish the site in a way that you can download a theme of images (Pac) and pay what you want.

So in essence you can pay nothing (or pay whatever you want).  Every Monday a new “Pac” of images is released for download.

A free pic will be chosen and released for free from Tuesday through Sunday. Pic Pac offers many variations of travel images that are unique and exceptionally high quality.

Arguably the most popular free stock image site with over 200,000 beautiful free photos gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers.

With a huge library of images and hundreds being added daily, there is a good chance you will find a unique, emotionally driven images for your next design project.

Unsplash images have been used in everything from Apple keynotes to WordPress’s default theme.

Arguably the most popular free stock image site with over 200,000 beautiful free photos gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers.

With a huge library of images and hundreds being added daily, there is a good chance you will find a unique, emotionally driven images for your next design project.

Unsplash images have been used in everything from Apple keynotes to WordPress’s default theme.

One More Additional Site

Whilst not free, we think this site provides the best value for money with unique & authentic images.

Tookapic was created to help anyone develop a habit of daily photo taking in a fun and addictive way.

An online community for people who want to capture their everyday life and improve their photography. 

Their stock photos are unique, authentic and engaging taken by everyday people.

They have a monthly plan that we find to be very valuable considering the high quality and uniqueness.

Conclusion

Finding images that will resonate with your target audience is important for engagement, and I think this list will help you to find that perfect image for your next web design or creative project.

Whilst all of these sites are currently offering public domain images free of charge, I would just make sure you check every time you download.

Now I’d like to hear from you!

Which free image site do you prefer?

Or maybe you have a favourite not on this list!

Either way, leave a quick comment below straight away.