5 Websites for Free Stock Photos

Photography is a prominent staple in a designer's toolkit and while most designers will use their own imagery to avoid copyright restrictions, some projects don't allow for the time or resources for original artwork. Enter the world of stock photography, a vast community of searchable images to best fit any project, even the most obscure. Websites like Shutterstock, Adobe Images, and Deposit Photos may offer more refined search results, but come with various licensing options and payment plans. We've found a few sites you'll want to bookmark for stock photos that are unique, professional, and completely free. 

Pexels
With more than 30,000 images and at least 3,000 newly uploaded per month, Pexels offers a variety of photo subjects and integrated search capabilities, such as searching by keyword, popular images, and even photos by color. 

Unsplash
A beautiful collection of free, high-resolution, "do whatever you want" photos from contributing photographers around the world. Submit your own photos or check back every 10 days to download 10 brand new images. 

Stocksnap.io
Made by the team at Snappa, Stocksnap.io is "not your typical crappy stock photo site" with high quality, high-resolution pictures added to their database daily, building "...a bad ass repository of beautiful stock photography." 

Burst 
Powered by Shopify, Burst offers a wide selection of photography aimed for entrepreneurs, bloggers, developers, and designers. Entirely under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, all photos are open to use for any purpose. 
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Pixabay
Reaching outside of plain old stock photography, Pixabay also offers more than 800,000 free-to-use photos, illustrations, vector graphics, videos, and even developer tools, jQuery and vanilla JavaScript plugins, as well.  

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