Our Favorite Sites for Free Stock Photos

Even though we live in world of words, imagery helps with the eye has no time to linger.

Twitter and Facebook posts with images receive significantly higher interaction rates. Remember when we wrote about the free Share as Image app? If you it to pair images with a good quote, and count on more likes and retweets.

There are many sites where one can purchase stock photos for personal and commercial use. But there are also many sites where stock images are available for free. Here are a few of our favorites:

Death to Stock Photo

Their name says it all. This is an email service. Each month, images are sent straight to your inbox. They are free for commercial use, your blog posts, social accounts and mockups. The site boasts, “We aim to be just like coffee for the modern creative.” @deathtostock

Life of Pix

New images are added weekly to this site which offers free high-resolution photos with no copyright restrictions. The images are available for personal and commercial use. Here’s one I downloaded of burned books:

2014-06-10-Life-Of-Pix-Free-Stock-Photos-burning-book (1)

 

Gratisography

This site, too, offers free high-resolution images for personal and commercial projects with no copyright restrictions. New images, which are captured by Ryan McGuire, are added weekly.

Pic Jumbo

PicJumbo offers “totally free photos for your commercial & personal works.” Follow them @picjumbo

New Old Stock

These vintage photos from the public archives are free of known copyright restrictions. They post an image every day from The Commons, but images may be found through a search as well. Today they posted this image: Men running in a chariot race at the Piha Surf Club carnival, [ca 1938], from the National Library New Zealand.

men in chariot race

 

Refe

Refe is a marketplace of photos captured with a mobile phone. Even though they’re a marketplace, they also post free photos for your personal or commercial projects on this tumblr.

Beth Golay

Beth is a reader, writer, marketer and Books & Whatnot founder. Even though she knows better, she's a sucker for a good book cover and will positively swoon if a book is set in appropriate type. @BethGolay