Having good photos on your blog and site is an often overlooked but important part in satisfying your site visitors. And having good images are probably the most obvious and the most powerful quick fix you can do to your content. Good images compliment and lift a blog post and are able to guide your audience along the journey you want them to take. But bad stock photos can interrupt that journey and distract from the story you want to tell. You don’t want your stock photos to feel too much like stock photos, if you know what I mean. Here are 17 amazing free stock photo sites that all have beautiful images. Many of these photographs are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under creative commons public domain dedication. This means (but please double check) that you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes. Never publish a blog post with crappy imagery again.

Death to stock photos

Receive a fresh pack of photos to your inbox each month, with awesome stories to match.

Picjumbo

Picjumbo has collections in different categories of totally free photos for your commercial & personal works.

Creative Market

Whilst Creative Market is primarily a payed marketplace for graphical elements (which are awesome), they do have some free stuff published every week, so make sure to check it out.

VSCO Grid

Fantastically curated images that have a very natural feel to them.

Pixabay

Search over 370000 free photos, illustrations, and vector graphics or share your own pictures as public domain.

Compfight

Compfight is a really cool image search engine tailored to find images on Flickr that uses the Creative Commons license.

Unsplash

Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution stock photos. Download 10 new free high-quality stock photos every 10 days. Simple as it gets.

Morguefile

morgueFile is a website database for free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

Stocksnap

High quality and high resolution images free from all copyright restrictions – no attribution required.

Gratisography

Free high-resolution pictures for personal and commercial projects.

Splitshire

Delicious free stock photos for commercial & personal use without limitations.

Lifeofpix

More free high resolution stock photos donated to the public domain, new images added weekly.

New Old Stock

Really cool old photos from other eras, when copyright issues weren’t such a big issue for marketers ;). Vintage photos from the public archives free of known copyright restrictions.

Snapwiresnaps

A visually stunning Tumblr with 7 hand-picked snaps every 7 days (free to use).

Canva

Canva is another great site for finding stock images. While Canva is mainly for making graphics, it has a built-in stock photo library of over 1 million stock images and illustrations when you decide to make graphics using its platform.

Stock Videos

Whilst there are a TON of great free stock photo resources out there (I even had to leave some out), free stock videos are a bit harder to get by. When should you use stock video you might ask? Well as we’ve talked about lots of times before on this blog, video marketing is one of THE best marketing strategies right now and stock videos are perfect to use when you need that extra spark of creativity in your videos. Just as with stock photos you need to make sure that the stock video clip suits your overall theme of your video but maybe you’re having logistical problems with sourcing video material. Maybe you live far from the ocean and need a short video of a wave, then you can use some stock videos from one of these sites.

Pexels Videos

Pexels Videos makes it easy to find free stock footage for your website, promo video or anything else. All videos are free for personal and commercial use. With the swiftly growing database of images and videos you are guaranteed to find the perfect resource for your video.

Videvo

Videvo offers a large selection of HD video clips, motion graphics and free stock footage. All Royalty-Free.

Videezy

Great featured free HD stock video footage.

Conclusion

There you go, the ultimate stock photo resource guide. Never pay for boring stock photos again. Stock photos and videos are also a great way to add that extra bit of professionality to your Shakr videos. You probably want to keep using mainly your own footage but resources like these can definitely help you create awesome looking videos. Please share this post if you enjoyed it! And sign up to our email list to get weekly free video templates that you can use for personal or business use!