10 Website Sources To Download FREE Images For Your Website & Blog

Images play a very important role in creating a website or starting a blog, As We need images to make our website and blog look more beautiful. Buying stock images may not be a viable idea for a starter.

As I interact with many bloggers and webmasters, I often come across this common question “Where should I Download Free Images for my Website and/or blog?” Today, In this post I will tell you the 10 Amazing Website Sources to Download Free Images for your website and blogs. You can download the images from these sources and use them on your website and blog for free without any copyright issues.

If you want to create your website, check my step-by-step tutorial to create a website and if you want to start a blog, I have another easy step-by-step guide to start a blog, you can create a website or start a blog and get them up in just a few minutes.

Let’s Quickly Understand The Image Licenses

Copyright usually describes something that is the intellectual property of someone. Say for example you have created software or image or you have written a book, you hold the copyright to these intellectual properties. Anything that is created many years back by someone, may still hold the copyright of his creativity.

Licensing gives permission to use the copyrighted property as per the terms of the license. So you can use an image in a different way as per the license associated with that Image. There are dozens of licenses, but the most common one which allows you to download and use the image for free falls under the Creative Commons (CC) license family.

• Creative Commons (CC): Generally Images under CC are FREE, But again there are various types of licenses as a part of the CC family which restrict the use of an image. Depending on the specific license, you might have to attribute (link to) the source, use the image non-commercially or use without alteration, etc., refer to their official website.
• Public Domain or CC0: Images marked as Public Domain or Creative Commons 0 means the original owner of the photograph has waived their rights to the copyright. In essence, you can use this image for whatever you want without any attribution.
• What are Royalty-Free Images? Royalty-Free refers to a licensing method under which image rights are sold at a flat rate. It means you need to buy the image once and then you’ve secured initial permission to an image and you can use it multiple times without paying again for the continued use of the image. This is how stock image websites work, They purchase the rights and then sell images on their website.

10 Website Sources To Find and Download Free Images For Your Website and Blogs

Here in this post, I will only tell you the 10 best sources to download free images for your website and blog (I personally use these websites to find the images for my websites and blogs). You too can download the images from these websites and use them for free on your websites and blogs without worrying about copyright issues.

1. Pixels

Pixels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable, and also easy to discover. Currently, they have over 30,000 free stock photos. And every month 3,000 plus new high-resolution photos are added to their database.

2. Pixabay

Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright-free images and videos. All contents are released under Creative Commons CC0, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist – even for commercial purposes. They have thousands of Images, Videos, Illustrations, and Vector Graphics.

3. Unsplash

Unsplash has got over 200,000 free high-resolution photos brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers. All photos published on Unsplash can be used for free. You can use them for commercial and non-commercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash.

4. Picjumbo

Picjumbo is free stock photo site created by designer & photographer Viktor Hanacek in 2013. It has got over thousands of high-quality images in different categories and over five million downloads as of now. You can use all of his images for free.

5. Burst

Burst is a free stock photo site that is powered by Shopify. All the photos on their platform are offered under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which means you can use the photos for any purpose. You can use the images for absolutely anything — on your blog or online store, social media campaigns, client work, and beyond.

6. Magdeleine

You can get thousands of images for free on Magdeleine. Images are properly tagged and searchable. You can search and find the images suitable for your project. Images are available under CC and CC0 licenses so be careful while using the images.

7. Refe – Free & Premium Images

On Refe you can find high-quality images of people interacting with technology for your projects. Although images are sold here, there is also a free category, you can find hundreds of high-quality images for Free for your website and blogs. Although you have to go through the same payment process to download the free images (you need to create an account) but you will not be charged anything on Free Images.

8. MyStock – Free Stock Images

MyStock is brought to you by ThemeIsle, ThemeIsle is also into WordPress Themes and Plugins Development. All photos published on MyStock are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, you can download free images from here. Images are completely free to be used even for commercial use. You can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, without asking permission or without putting a credit statement.

9. Gratisography

Gratisography is brought to you by Ryan McGuire, All pictures were photographed by Ryan McGuire and are free of copyright restrictions. You can get free high-resolution pictures you can use on your personal and commercial projects.

10. Death to the Stock Photo

Death to the Stock Photo is completely different from the other image sources we discussed above to download free images, here you can not browse and download the images. But you need to sign up with them and every month they will send you beautiful photos to your inbox. It’s sometimes really useful as you need not have to go to some website for the images but the drawback is you only get the images they send to you.

These are the 10 best website sources (known to me) to download free images for your project (websites or blogs) for any use. I am sure you can find high-quality and beautiful images easily from these websites that best suit your blogs and website projects.

Please Note: Some of these websites provide images licensed under CC (Needs Attribution) or CC0, So be careful with the image licenses while using them. Also on some of these websites, you will find licenses which restrict in re-distribution, you need to respect and value the efforts of the photographer and use the images in an ethical way. CC0 images do not require any attribution, but it’s really good if you can put a credit to the photographer if possible. This helps them add more new images on a regular basis.

Do let me know if any other sources are known to you for free image download in the comment section below. Also, last but not least, Please share this post with your friends on social networks, it really motivates me to bring such resources for you.