Free stock images
It’s always better to take or commission your own photography. I hope that by now, you have learned how important it is to craft a unique brand style (one inspired by your values, imbued with your mood-words, and honed to speak to your audience).
It’s rare that stock photography can do this, and even more rare to find enough stock photographs that are on-brand for you to fulfil your photography needs.
However, there are times when we need an image and simply don’t have the time, access or capacity to capture it for ourselves. That’s when free stock images come to the fore.
Royalty-free versus actually free
You’ve probably heard the term “royalty free” images, and this is something that many people mistakenly believe means the images are free to use. Not so! This term simply means that you don’t have to pay royalties every time you use the image. Usually, you do have to pay for it, but you only pay once and then can use it as frequently as you like.
What you want to look for are images with Creative Commons license (the different licenses will tell you what you can and cannot do with the images, and whether or not you need to attribute the photographer).
In this lesson, I’ve listed five of my favourite places to find beautiful images with Creative Commons licenses. There are many more sites, but I have used each of these, and can recommend them.
Unsplash 👇
Unsplash is a curated collection of more than 3 million completely free-to-use photographs, uploaded by creators all over the world. Every photograph is hand-selected, so the quality is unusually high. It’s my favourite go-to for stock photography, because you can often find images that are more creative and moodier than the usual cheesy “model sipping coffee at computer” shots.
Pexels 👇
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos that, like Unsplash, are contributed by a global community of creators and are hand-picked to ensure the quality remains high. Pexels has its own license, which allows you to use them and adapt them in any way you like, as long as you follow their very reasonable guidelines (like not showing identifiable people in ways that are offensive, not selling unedited copies, or using these images to make your own photography platform).
Burst 👇
Burst is another free photography platform. It’s part of Shopify, but you don’t need to have a Shopify website to use it. The photographs are submitted by a global community of photographers, and are curated to ensure the quality remains high. They are free to use for commercial use, even if you intend to print them onto objects and sell them.
Kaboompics 👇
What’s really handy about Kaboompics is that you can search according to subject but also filter your search to suit your colour palette. So for example, you could search “food” but then also click “orange” and you’ll only be shown food images with the colour orange in them. Likewise, you can filter your search to the orientation of the photographs. There don’t seem to be as many images in the Kaboompics collection as some others, but the quality is high, and the colour-search is really handy.
Pixabay 👇
Similar to the sites listed above, Pixabay provides free-to-use images (and illustrations, videos and music) that have been contributed by a global community. You do need to join in order to use it, but joining is free. The photographs are checked for technical and quality requirements, but there’s less “curating” done on Pixabay than some of the other sites.
