Apart from the different subscription plans, you can also buy credit packs and access all kinds of collections. IStock (formerly iStockphoto) is another popular premium site with amazing photos to enrich your content. Powered by Getty Images, this stock photo website offers two broad collections – Essentials and Signature.
Best Paid Stock Image Sites
You can buy single photos right away, or if you want to save them for later, you’ll have to make an account. Reviews often commend the user-friendly interface offered by DepositPhotos and praise customer support. Most designers and photo fans, even casual ones, have heard the name Getty Images before.
Upload is straightforward, but their review process can feel like rolling dice—sometimes your “boring” images sail through, and your passion project gets the boot. Payouts start at a laughable $0.10 to $0.33 per download (seriously), but no other site moves volume like this one. The best things in life are free, and stock photography sites are no exception to the rule.
AI Design Tools to Transform Your Creative Workflow
Picography might not be the largest free stock photo website, but all the content you find on the page is outstandingly appealing to the eye. They are hand-picked to ensure that every photo on the website offers something unique. In addition, all the photographs are CCO-licensed, and you can use them wherever you want. There are many different categories of imagery presented on Picography, and you can submit your work. Make your search more specific by typing your desired keyword in the search bar or browsing through popular searches.
- What’s more, these creative assets can be used in your personal and commercial work.
- Have you ever noticed how most stock photos seem to use models that all look the same?
- Another feature that sets Unsplash apart from other free photo sites is its Collections section.
- Plus, you can easily search images and get the top-performing options listed right at the top of your results.
- You can choose to purchase images on an individual basis or grab images in bundles or collections.
Christmas Stock Images
IStock is another popular name in the stock photography industry. As such, it can provide a good platform for displaying your images (and of course a better chance of selling). Depositphotos has been on the stock photography market since 2009 when it was founded by Dmitry Sergeev.
Top 10 Best Stock Photo Sites to Find Stunning Images
When browsing stock photo sites, you’ll encounter diverse content types including lifestyle shots, business imagery, nature scenes, conceptual photos, and technological visuals. These images save significant time and resources compared to organizing custom photoshoots, making them invaluable for content creators working with tight deadlines or budget constraints. Shutterstock has expanded beyond just stock photos with an exceptional suite of creative tools. Their AI image generator (powered by DALL-E 3) costs just $7 monthly for 100 generations and is cheaper than most other AI generators. At the same time, their image editor rivals Canva for creating quick designs, and the recent AI tools make design and editing easier for beginners. You can also integrate Shutterstock’s library into a number of software tools.
- Powered by Getty Images, this stock photo website offers two broad collections – Essentials and Signature.
- Getty Images is one of the most prestigious stock photography agencies in the world.
- Photos are categorized by type of food and there’s also a selection of photos of cookware as well as cooking and food prep images.
For website headers or large displays, I look for stock photos with a minimum width of 2000 pixels to avoid pixelation when scaled. Beyond technical specifications, I assess composition elements like focal points, rule of thirds application, and lighting quality. Professional stock photos exhibit balanced exposure, proper white balance, and sharp focus where intended. I’ve learned to avoid obviously staged or clichéd stock photos featuring unnatural poses or exaggerated expressions, as these can undermine credibility. Instead, I select authentic-looking images with natural lighting and genuine interactions, which increase audience engagement and strengthen the connection to my content. Vecteezy offers the top platform for downloading high-quality, royalty-free photos, videos, and vectors that are safe and easy to use.
This can be helpful if you aren’t great at using the search bar to find specific photos. For a free stock photo site, the quality of the images is excellent. This is why they earn their spot as one of the best free stock photo sites.
And, with the prestigious Adobe backing behind the site, there’s a steady stream of high-quality material being added to the site. For those reasons, Adobe Stock is a solid, dependable choice for businesses that won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. However they all follow a standard for the Royalty Free license model, so the main terms are common to all of them. You must always read the license terms carefully to make sure you understand them (and your intended use is covered)!
If you want to use the images for print or at higher resolution, you can buy a subscription or pay for them individually. The site also includes a useful online photo editor that you can use to make quick social media graphics or make changes to photos you want to use in your projects. While all these photos should be free best stock photography sites to use, as they’re sourced from multiple locations it’s wise to check the license before you download. You can also browse images by categories including animals, architecture, business, flower, food, emotion, health, nature, industry, and more. All images are released under a CC0 license and are free for personal or commercial use.
With their solid reputation and the largest stock image library,, Getty Images attracts a significant amount of traffic to their site, increasing your chance of selling your work. If you’re looking to sell AI-generated images, check out this guide. Most of these sites also have smartphone apps to sell photos online. Although they truly give you the opportunity to earn a passive income, there are quite a few things to consider before diving into the big stock photo world.
Best Stock Photo Sites for High-Quality Images
If you like one of those photos, you’ll be redirected to the agency website to buy it. You know CC0 means risk, but this is certainly a serious and respectable website. Pixabay is a very large free stock photo site based in Germany, created by Hans Braxmeier and Simon Steinberger (both with a background in computer technology). They provide images you can download and use free of charge, that they crowdsource from users. They have amassed a collection of over 1.4 million files and counting offered on a very professional, “stock-photo-agency-looking” site that includes a blog and a community forum. TONL is a stock photo agency looking to bring diversity to stock photography, through accurate and modern representations of people of color, their culture, and their lives.
What can I use stock photos for?
When you’re satisfied with the design, you can simply approve it, and Vecteezy will provide the final file formats you’ve requested. The pricing for custom work depends on the particulars of your design choices, but you don’t need to pay until you’re sure you’re ready to go forward with the project. Holding one of the spots as a long-standing presence in the world of digital media, Shutterstock is a name most photo researchers will recognize. New photos are released every Thursday under the Creative Commons CC0 license. Jay Mantri posts some really nice photos with a variety of different themes. Vecteezy requires attribution but includes signed model and property releases for every free photo.
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