I’ve been keeping a list like this around for a while, and the CSS-Tricks Staff just added a bunch of new links to it, so I figured HEY that sounds like fun little weekend post. There are so many of these it’s really no excuse to have crappy photos in the work you do, be it websites, presentations, print work, whatever.
New Old Stock
Vintage photos from the public archives. Free of known copyright restrictions.
Unsplash
Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos. 10 new photos every 10 days.
Also, I think re:splashed is the same photos with a different interface? Not sure.
Flickr Commons
The key goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world’s public photography archives.
Cupcake
A photographer’s treat by Jonas Nilsson Lee. Free (do what ever you want) photos.
Jay Mantri
Free pics. Do anything (CC0). Make magic. 7 new photos every Thursday.
Magdeleine
Hand-picked free photos for your inspiration.
MMT
Free for commercial use stock photos by Jeffrey Betts. CC0 license. New photos every week.
JÉSHOOTS
JÉSHOOTS I founded because they like to take pictures and it’s a shame some photos withhold the entire world for free, all designers, all working with photos, for those who need a thematic photo free.
ISO Republic
High-quality, free photos for creatives
FuriousCamera
Free Life Hi-Fi Photos. You can use on your personal and commercial projects. New photo every day.
Realistic Shots
Free stock photos (high resolution) for personal and commercial use. 7 new photos every week. Just make something creative!
Free Nature Stock
Royalty-free Nature Stock Photos. Use them however you want. Updated daily.
NOBL WEB
Free (do as you please), high-resolution photos and textures.
Bara Art
Free high resolution photos for your personal and even commercial projects!
FancyCrave
Royalty free high resolution images for your personal and commercial projects.
Freely Photos
Totally free high quality Christian stock photography All photos are published under the amazing ‘CC0 license’. Do what you want with them!
Barn Images
Barn Images offers you a collection of free high-resolution stock photography.
Trunklog
I’ve had a lot of pictures that I never used for a long time, but hopefully, you will find them useful. Feel free to browse and download any photo for personal or commercial use. You don’t have to notify or credit me if you use one of my pics, but I’ll be happy if you do.
Little Visuals
The author of this site, Nic, suddenly died. The archive of free photos is still online, though, and the site has more information and a way to donate.
Death to the Stock Photo
About a year ago we noticed an less-than-awesome industry pattern: too many extraordinary brands, bloggers, and creatives struggled to find images that fit their vibe + tribe. Turns out, the solution lay on our laptops. We had files upon files of our own photos gathering dust. We figured: why not spread ’em around?
Superfamous Images
The Superfamous Images are available under the conditions of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means that you can use the work for your own purposes as long as credit is provided.
The Pattern Library
Gratisography
Free high-resolution pictures you can use on your personal and commercial projects.
Foodies Feed
Picography
Free hi-resolution photos. Use them however you like.
raumrot
Free handpicked stock photos for your commercial and personal works.
More!
- A lot of stock photo sites have a “free photo of the day” – so look for that. Doesn’t hurt to have a Dropbox folder full of design resources!
- Google Images has a way to filter search results by license:
- IM Free: A curated collection of free resources, all for commercial use.
- Stock Up
If you know of some more good ones, drop them in the comments.
Nice list! I have used some of those in production and the website that helped me the most with the quantity and quality of content is pexels.com
Why wasn’t used
target="_blank"for links?Try holding down “Command” (on a Mac), then clicking.
Works great! ;-)
There was a blog post on CSS-Tricks on why that should not be used. :) https://css-tricks.com/use-target_blank/
Thank you for the great collection!
Awesome list!
lostandtaken.com is another great one for texture/background type images.
You’ve missed pexels.com. They aggregate all of these photos in one place.
Oh I just saw that it was already mentioned by another user in the comments.
OK, so I’ve aggregated all the sites (plus a couple of sites suggested in the comments) as a Google Image search, and formatted it for use in Chrome custom search (“Settings” > “Search” > “Manage Search Engines”). You’re welcome. :-)
This will come in very handy. Thanks.
Incidentally, doesn’t one of those standing women look like the girl in “Wonder Years” (Danica McKellar)?
http://40.media.tumblr.com/59ca3529cadfcfbbcf8de154ffd613c8/tumblr_ngotatAiLG1sfie3io1_1280.jpg
Must be her grandmother.
Coincidentally, today I stumbled upon this site, which also has a similar list (among other things): http://wwwhere.io
how can i post a new blog post on the css-tricks.com?
sorry for the dumb question. :(
We have forums, that’s kinda like blog posts only specifically for discussion. Also, the CodePen offers free blogging if that seems more your speed.
pixabay.com 380,000 photos, vectors and illustrations.
A few others worth noting.
Stocksnap: https://stocksnap.io/
Boss Fight: http://bossfight.co/
Awesome list. Thanks for posting!
I’m a contributor to Unsplash, thanks for including it in this list.
I love Open Source and Open Content. Enjoy!
P.S. This one is my most popular pic on Unsplash.
Don’t forget the Wikimedia Commons, a repository of over 25 million freely-usable media files.
Pixabay is an awesome site for free images.
Hi Chris
you might also like: http://allthefreestock.com it’s a curated list of sites that offer free stock image, video and more
I love trunklog, I saw a lot of beautiful photos there.
Thanks for sharing, I can see many more from here.
Also http://boston.photos for free stock photos from the Boston area.
Thank you Chris list awesome best resources for us.
Thanks for the @freenaturestock mention, Chris. Much appreciated.
Chris, thanks for the list. Just FYI, the BaraArts link is is missing.
John
Thanks John! Just fixed that link.
Incredible list. Used Freely and Unsplash, but the others are new to me. Will spread the word and above all support these guys :)
https://stocksnap.io/ is so good I almost want to keep it to myself.
Nice list! Honoured that Unsplash was included :) You Rock
http://thestocks.im/ is my go-to place for great stock photos. It’s a collection of a lot of these all in one place.
Hi,
Nice site, do you know how to get in touch with the owner of that site?
Also check out http://www.goodfreephotos.com for thousands of unique public domain photos, especially travel and landscape photos. Appreciate it if you could add it to your list. Thanks.
Great list! Would you consider adding http://goodstock.photos to this post? It’s a site I created that releases a new stock photo daily, free to use anywhere
I can recommend https://plixs.com Plixs serve thousands of free public domain images and has great search features. Maybe you can add the source to your list.
Out of curiosity how do most of you ensure, to the best you can, that you are protecting yourselves legally when using images portrayed as “free usage”? I am looking at most of these sites and see where they have terms of use pages that state the types of creative commons license they allow, but what is to stop that from changing in the future and then some company retroactively coming after someone?
I suppose I could screenshot the page and/or save a text file with a link to the cc terms of use, but if that changes in the future it becomes invalid?
Creative Commons licenses are not revocable.
I did read up on the terms and thanks for stating it anyhow Jason, but my concern is more to the fact that even if they are not revocable, you still may have to prove that you obtained them under creative commons to begin with. If for some reason they are removed from a site how do you prove they were under creative commons to begin with? It does not seem there there is any overseeing body that records what all is licensed.
I don’t want to detract the original point of this post to a legal debate, but was curious how everyone keeps a “ledger” of sorts to prove how they obtained these images.
Unfortunately some people falsely claim that an image is public domain when it is not. We often assume that when we see a creative commons license that the “photographer” offering the license is honestly the original photographer. In a situation like this, being misled does not get you off the hook of a copyright violation.
@James That’s something I’ve often wondered about myself. Law is a funny beast. How the heck can we be absolutely certain that the person who submitted the photo is the photographer? Risky stuff, man!
Even when you purchase a stock photo, you can’t know that the author is truly the author. Your receipt of purchase is worthless if both you and the stock photo company have been snookered by an impostor. Now you are legally liable for copyright violations and court costs. Thankfully all the major stock companies provide default legal guarantees and offer extended legal guarantees (if you pay extra) to protect you from this situation.
Many of the sites are are from a specific photographer with only his specific work, and that should bring some peace of mind.
http://www.morguefile.com
Dear Chris,
While some of the site you have listed are creditable as a high quality photos, with all respect, some are not at all. As a photographer and speaking on behalf of many colleagues amateur and pro photographers, the idea of “CC0” as it called, is not something respectable towards photographers. Photographers are being generous giving away photos with CC license that can also be used for commercial purposes, all you need to do is give credit, which in fact gives the photo more value. Just notice all big sites and blogs, they always give credit to the photo they post. So what is this obsession for “Do what ever you want” images thing?
If you notice the images (mostly images and not photos) in sites with CC0 license, you would discover that they are not even close to make it to high quality photos, most of the images there are very normal photos with added effects (most usually exposure) to make it seem or look good. Most of these images link back to some programming developer, which assures these are not shot with real photographers and not close to high quality photos (I am not trying to say that only photographers can shoot high quality photos).
I have very little knowledge in code but have been learning few bits about websites and especially how to play with CSS. Css-tricks has been a lot of help to me in that regards. I noticed that you programmers do also give away your code for free via the GNU, but they are always credited as the developers of that code. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Flickr is a great source for those CC images but you may have to spend sometime until you find that perfect photo. There is an alternative were you can get very high quality photos and all with CC license for commercial use in a site called “high resolution photography”. They may not have thousands of photos, but there small list is growing with some quality photos which you may only find the same in explored or 500px.
Hope I did make my point and will pass all my respect to you.
Nice resources and these can be useful especially for graphic designers.
As expected, if you are searching images with people, there aren’t too many options out there. And the time wasted to find something that doesn’t exactly match your needs will take you back to the subscription based stock-photo sites=)