When building a website or maintaining a blog it might get quite difficult to always find an image which goes with your content. You don’t want a mess of product logo’s your post is about nor do you want an “amateuristic” one being on top of your beautiful post. Stock images can cost quite some money, but luckily for us free alternatives exist.
Pexels
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos and videos licensed under the Pexels license. Photos and videos are hand-picked from uploaded content by users or sourced from free image websites. In case you don’t find the photo or video you’re looking for, you’ll get some nice suggestions for photos on Shutterstock.
Unsplashed
The Unsplashed library is build up by a community with over 100k members. It was founded in 2013 as a $19 Tumblr theme. They hired a photographer to take photo’s for the creators business website Crew. They only used one of the photos, the rest they’ve put on Tumblr for other users, free to use.
Pixabay
Founded in 2010, according to whois DNS lookup, Pixabay offers over 1.6 million royalty free stock videos and photos. I didn’t use this library as often as the other ones, but I definitely will start using it more often.
Stockvault
Stockvault offers over 250 million images, footage and music tracks, but I have to admit, the quality of the images isn’t always the same as on the platforms mentioned above. On the other hand, it just might be the place where you’ll find that one picture you’re looking for.
Picjumbo
Last but not lease, Picjumbo. Next to a lot of single, free stock photos, there’s a premium version which lets you download sets of images, from a product, a place, … with the same style. Ideal for when you’re writing about technology products for example.