Visual content plays a significant role in your digital marketing success. Visual elements have become a relevant form of content for marketers to increase engagement and improve their presence online. The fact is, words alone are not enough to grab your target audience’s attention, but using images brings your content to life.
When things are handed to us visually, we are able to process it better. We can respond easier. But what if you don’t have enough visual resources? What if you can’t create the photo you want?
One option that marketers used frequently is what we call Stock Images. A kind of visual material that is readily available online through stock images sites. Stock images sites offer diverse collections of photos. There is a growing number of websites with beautiful and high-resolution images.
A tricky part of sourcing stock images is about their usage rights. These images can either be free or paid, and depends on what you need. But for many, the kind of material they need can be accessed through a free stock images site. These sites are free from copyright restrictions and usually don’t require attribution. You can adapt, modify, and use them for free.
Creative Commons is one of the most common licenses agencies, and creators use today. It has six different types of licenses with different conditions ranging from the most to the least permissive. Using CC license photos may require attribution depends on how you use the content. Learn more about Creative Commons here.
Below is a list of some free stock images sites:
Unsplash
With literally over 1 million free stock photos available on their site, contributed by a community of over 150,000 photographers, Unsplash is one of the best websites to find the visual content that you need for free.
StockSnap.io
Look for the perfect imagery from a variety of collections added weekly on StockSnap.io totally for free under Creative Common CCO license.
Free Nature Stock
Despite a limited number of images with only one photo uploaded each day, Free Nature Stock still offers beautiful nature images personally captured by Adrian Pelletier for free licensed under Creative Commons Zero.
Burst
Backed by Shopify, browse high-resolution photos on Burst from a variety of different categories for websites and commercial use.
Pexel
Another great source of these images is Pexel. Discover the most popular and stunning free stock images and videos all for free.
Pixabay
Pixabay contains over 1.8 million stock images that you can use for commercial or non-commercial purposes free of copyright restrictions with their simplified Pixabay License.
Coverr
Coverr makes beautiful footage of stock videos accessible to everyone for free.
Death to stock
The site published a broad range of fresh visuals uniquely as membership is required to access them.
Gratisography
They focused not on the number of images they can offer, but on quality. Gratisography contains a vast of well-curated and most creative photos that you can use as you please.
Pikwizard
Make your online content more interesting with the stunning images and videos you can find from Pikwizard. With over 1 million stock images available and new ones added weekly, Pikwizard is an excellent resource for any theme you need.