Where To Find Free Stock Photos

Lets start with where you should NOT find free photos. Just because you found a nice photo via Google search, or on your favorite photo, and you can download it, doesn't mean its free. You may be allowed to use it - but you will need to contact the photographer to do so. They may let you use the photo for free - but they will probably want at least an acknowledgment of their copyright. Yes just because a photo is on line, that doesn't mean its not copyright!

So where can I get free stock photos you ask? Lets look at some free, and some sorta free sites. Which is the best site for free stock photos will really come down to what you are looking for, and how you want to use the photo. I'll tell you now, that if you intend to use the photo off-line, rather than just on a website, you will probably have to pay.

Talk about an difficult to remember url! But this Hungarian site is one of the oldest stock photo sites out there. Not all of the photos are free, though a lot are, but they are all royalty free, which means that you pay a one-off fee rather than paying for each time you use the image.

I've used the site for years, and I've never seen the design change. Its not terrible, but its not good either, I can usually find what I want. They do have a fairly good range of images.

Most images here are basically using the creative commons approach to copyright (or copyleft as its sometimes called). You are allowed to use and adapt the photos but often the license is share and share alike. Which means that because you didn't pay for the image you can't charge any image you make from the original. You also should acknowledge the source and images by default have a © statement at the bottom.

photo © Zbigniew Twardowski for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

You will often find historic images are out of copyright and are available for use - check with your local library or historical research organizations.

Getting Paid Images for Free (Legitimately)

Many of the paid-for stock photography sites will allow you to try before you buy - check out my review of depositphotos.com - for an example of this.