There are plenty of useful sites out there offering free stock photos under the Creative Common (CC) license.
What does it mean by a CC license? It is one of several copyright licenses which allows free distribution of otherwise copyrighted works.
Designers, journalists, bloggers find these sites a Godsend as they can use the images free with no worries about copyright.
Business owners at the startup stage who cannot afford to hire graphic designers or photographers might find these sites helpful too.
Here are five best free stock photos sites for your convenience and legal use of great images:
1. Pixabay
Feel free to choose either photos, illustrations, vector graphics or videos for your usage.
They are all high quality images and footage films free of copyright.
Hans Brazmeier, the founder and CEO of Pixabay himself contributed over 20,000 images.
As of November 2017, the website offers more than 1.2 millions of free stock photos, illustrations, vectors and videos.
Although they are free to use, you can always support the artists through PayPal.
If you want to return the artists’ favour, submit some donations to them by ‘buying them coffee’.
2.Pexels
Pexels aims to help designers, bloggers and everyone out there to find great photos that you can use everywhere for free.
The best of Pexels is it offers Pexels Photo Challenges. So, try to upload great photos and win some prizes.
The blog section of this website gives you an insight of what goes behind the scene some of the great images featured on Pexels.
Though the blog is not regularly updated, you still can find a tip or two there.
3.Free Images
The categories vary from ‘Animals & Wildlife’ to ‘Army & Weapons’ and even ‘Textures & Patterns’.
If you found your favourite photographer, the site allows you to follow them, allowing you to see their latest photos.
Free Images also enables you to search for photographers from your own country.
This is helpful especially if you are looking for images from your local scenes.
4. Unsplash
Unsplash started as a Tumblr blog about four years ago and is now home to 50,000 photographers.
It pride itself as a source of inspiration for everyone from award-winning writers like Deepak Chopra to big company like Apple.
The categories are straight forward and easy to find like business, women, nature, technology, food and travel images.
Moreover, there are cool wallpapers available for your desktop, iPhone, and Android backgrounds.
5.Morguefile
This website is a free photo archive founded by Michael Connors in 1996.
Morguefile encourages visitors to upload images they’ve taken in exchange for the images they downloaded.
Go on photo assignment with #Quest, a daily photo challenge to capture the world around you.
