Have you ever noticed how much better a post performs with a high quality image attached to it? Unfortunately, having a photographer on staff is outside the budget of most companies, so skillfully navigating the free stock photo waters can save a LOT of money.
Sourcing images for your blog, social media accounts, or real estate website doesn’t have to be a painful, expensive process. In fact, there are a ton of great resources where folks can find high quality stock photos for free without paying a hefty monthly subscription.
Final Note: There may be some restrictions and limitations for using photos from these sites. We tried to simplify how they can be used, but we highly suggest double-checking the terms and conditions and license agreement of each site to avoid any potential copyright related issues. Boooo lawsuits – Booooooo.
…Onto the list
- Pixabay carries over 800,000 free stock photos, vectors, and art illustrations.
- All images and videos on Pixabay are licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which means you may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty free for anything, including commercial purposes without attribution.
- Pexels currently offers over 25,000 free stock photos, and add another 3,000 high resolution photos every month.
- All of their photos are licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0)
- Under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
- Pexels even offers free b-roll video for any video editing projects.
- Unsplash has a wide variety of royalty free stock photos available with a search function to help filter out the best photos for your needs.
- Photos in Unsplash are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0).
- Gratisography features free high-resolution photos free of copyright restrictions save a few (full terms here).
- All photos are taken by Ryan McGuire
- Life of Pix is a great resource for Creative Commons Zero (CC0) images.
- New photos are added to the site weekly, and if you’re in the market for royalty-free video, their site LifeofVids.com is the place to look!
- A lot of folks don’t know that you can actually search for free images directly from Google with the help of some added filters. You’ll need to navigate to Google Images, Click on ‘Search Tools’, then ‘Usage Rights’ to filter your results.
- Labeled for reuse is a good place to start, but once again, double-check to ensure the photos are cleared to use using the direct links.
- In the case of the photo above, since google scours the web for these photos, it’s actually pulled the above image from Wikimedia Commons, and requires attribution to use the photo. Thanks Patrick Cashin!
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- Flickr Creative Commons actually allows you to search by license type – which makes figuring out permissions and attribution a relatively painless process.
- Here’s that link: https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
- Clicking on the image and link above will take you directly into the Public Domain Dedication, which is the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) segment we’ve been dealing in thus far which requires no attribution and can be used for commercial purposes.
- Although it may not have the largest selection of home/real estate related images, there are many practical images to be found among their library of thousands of photos.
- Splitshire’s photos are free to use with a few obvious exceptions (License details here). Basically, don’t resell, distribute to third party stock websites, or use it in any inappropriate manner.
- Libreshot features hundreds of high quality, free stock photos available under Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
- This means you can use the photos for personal or commercial use with the exception of posting pictures on other photo bank sites.
- With StockSnap.io, you get access to tons of high quality, royalty free images.
- All images are made available through the Creative Commons Zero license, meaning you can use them for personal and commercial use without restriction.
- PicJumbo is another library of royalty free stock photos – so long as you don’t upload them to other free stock photo websites or do anything shady…
- Kaboompics provides over 1,600 free high quality photos for you to download.
- No attribution is required for the usage of these images, however, you can’t redistribute the photos to other sites for download. Easy peasy.
- New Old Stock is devoted to reclaiming vintage photos from the public archives. If you need an old photo – look no further than New Old Stock.
- ISO Republic provides free images for personal and commercial projects.
- It’s a good idea to check out their Terms page for more information on where you can and can’t use these commercially as it’s not so cut and dry as the others.
- In any case, there’s a large selection of high quality home photos to be found here.
- Over at FancyCrave you’ll find free high resolution photos with two new images hitting their site every day.
- These photos are distributed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), meaning they’re free to use for personal or commercial use, no attribution required.
- Tookapic tackles both premium and free images on their site, but the good news is that you can filter your searches for just free images.
- Photos typically do require attribution and a link back to the website, so ease of integration takes a little hit. But the selection of real estate and home related photos are pretty good here.
- Image Credit: Andrew E Weber
- Snapwire Snaps is dedicated to curating some of the highest quality stock photos on the internet.
- They license and commission photos from 200,000 of the world’s most talented photographers and make photos available for free under Creative Commons Zero (CC0).
- They also have a premium service which offers even more photos, but at a cost.
- FreeStocks.org offers a wide variety of free stock photos made available under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). You’re free to use them for personal and commercial purposes.
- Jay Mantri offers a wide variety of high quality photos available for free from his website JayMantri.com.
- Unfortunately, there’s no search feature so you’ll have to do a little digging if you’re looking for something specific.
- All photos are provided under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), so happy hunting!
- Getrefe makes it easy to navigate to home and lifestyle pictures, perfect for blogs and social posts. You do have to “buy” the free images, which involves a checkout process which is a little odd, but the pictures are of great quality.
- Always check license information to be sure, but the photos ‘purchased’ from the site can be used for personal, commercial, blog posts, publications, and themes and templates that are sold.
- The good news is FreeImages has nearly 400,000 free images to peruse and download.
- The bad news is that you’ll have to sign up for an account to download anything – but it’s free and not too much of a hassle.
- Also, make sure to check the content license of each file before you download – as it looks to work on a image-by-image basis.
- Are the hoops are worth it? That’s for you to decide.
Additional Resources
We realize there are other sites out there for free stock photos. Some require signing up for their email list to receive photo packs whereas others may have stock photos geared less towards real estate specifically. This section is devoted to those a handful of those sites. Once again, make sure to pay special attention to the usage rights of the photos to avoid any potential legal troubles.
Conclusion
That about wraps up the list, let us know which sites you use and which are your favorites! Now get out there and make something beautiful!