Content marketing is the future and if you want your content to get abundant shares, you’ll have to use beautiful images to attract more eyeballs. Not to mention there are exclusively image based social networks which proves the importance of images within content. Let it be facebook or twitter, images are undoubtedly the best shared form of content. People love images and studies have proven the fact that visual content is far more appealing than solely text based content.
Though, it can be a tedious task to continuously look for free to use images for websites. First it can get pretty expensive to buy images. Secondly, it can take hours of research to dig deep in Google Image search to find out suitable images. So I decided to share with you some of the websites where you can get cheap and stunning images to use for free.
1- IStockPhoto
Started with around 2000 photos IStock grew to become one of the top sources for royalty free stock images. Millions of people use it every day to get exceptional quality photos.
2- Freedigitalphotos
Every image at FreeDigitalPhotos is free with an option to buy larger images. Their photos are very suitable for business and personal use.
3- Openphoto
Openphoto hosts plenty of free to use photographs for bloggers. Check out the link!
4- Freemediagoo
The core purpose of FreemediaGoo is to facilitate people with royalty free images. They can be used in print, TV or internet for commercial and personal use.
5- Picdrome
Another wonderful database of plenty of royalty free stock photos for your use. It can be handy for people looking for illustrations too.
6- StockVault
StockVault is a website where students, photographers and designers share their photographs. Started in 2004 and fulfilling the needs of bloggers with royalty free stock ever since.
7- Unprofound
Jim began Unprofound back in 2001 to help people in finding a collection of photos to use. It has grown to a global community of photographers now.
8- Pixabay
Pixabay hosts a repository of public domain pictures and exists to make it possible for bloggers to use photos for commercial applications.
9- Photobucket
Often used for personal and business purposes, Photobucket is another image hosting website. It was founded back in 2003 and hosts more than 10 billion images.
10- Unsplash
10 high resolutions photos for every 10 days! Sounds interesting, huh? Subscribe at Unsplash to land high resolution photos in your inbox by every 10 days.
11- Freeimages
Whether you want to download free photos or you want to upload, this site is for you! A subsidiary of GettyImages yet a huge database of quality stock photos.
12- Foter
This website allows you to download and add photos to your blog posts or websites. Foter Hosts more than 190 Million photos from different sources and also available as a wordpress plugin for your ease.
13- Compfight
How many of you have heard of Compfight.com? It is an image based search engine developed specifically to find images for blogs. Not associated with but uses Flickr API.
14- 123RF
123RF is a digital library of a wide range of images that can be purchased or used with giving out credit. They host more than 24 million royalty free images to be used for any purpose.
These are just a few of my favourite sources to find images. Feel free to share how you find images for your blog posts or websites in comments section below.