The 5 best websites for (free) royalty-free stock photos

You won’t make any reader happy with a piece of text without appropriate images to go with it. But taking your photos for every article you write might also be a bit too much. The solution? Countless stock photo sites, paid and free. In this blog, I will show you the five best royalty-free stock photo websites of 2020. And if you’re looking for paid stock photo sites, scroll on down too because I’ll mention one.

Why do we want royalty-free stock photos?

Duty-free stock photos are free, and that is the main reason I like to use them. But in addition to that, with royalty-free stock photos, you know for sure that you don’t risk getting a claim, and you can still keep your style in the ample supply of images. You may have more choice in the range of paid photos, but the quality of stock photos does not usually detract from that of paid photos. Nowadays, many good stock photo sites offer paid and non-paid images, so pictures are available for every project and budget. Which five royalty-free stock photo sites I prefer to use, I will explain to you in detail below.

The five best stock photo sites

Pexels

Number one, my favorite: www.pexels.com. I love explicit websites with a great search function. At Pexels, you can search by keywords, but you can also view collections if you don’t know precisely what you want to search for. The photos are displayed in a Pinterest-like manner so you can quickly and easily scroll through the search results. I also find a handy feature in the “similar photos” section under each photo you open. If you like a picture, you can go to this part of the site to find similar images. It saves you some time having to search for lovely photos yourself!

 ✔ Particularly high-quality pictures

✔ Many different kinds of images

✔ Many different photographers

Unsplash

Another great site: www.unsplash.com, where, like Pexels, they have a straightforward keyword search and pre-made collections. Again, the display of the photos is clear, and you quickly get inspired by the layout of the images. Unsplash has the bonus of offering a lot of choice in artistic images. You have come to the right place if you look for beautiful pictures of cities, buildings, and landscapes.

 ✔ Particularly high-quality photos

✔ Many different kinds of images

✔ Specialty: artistic images

Burst

The place for royalty-free stock photos for your business is www.burst.shopify.com. This stock photo site is powered by Shopify and has, besides regular stock photos, also a specific section for businesses: “Business Ideas.” Under this heading, you will find collections specifically designed for different types of interactions with photos to match. From art supplies to camping stores, you name it, Burst has pictures for it. Super convenient if you’re starting with your online store and you don’t have a budget for your own made photos! You only have to leave your e-mail address if you want to download the images. Besides the downloadable photos, Burst also offers you some commercial tips, of course from Shopify.

 ✔ Special collection of Business Ideas

✔ Additional commercial tips

✔ Many different styles

Pixabay

A site where you can easily search for stock photos of a specific size or color is www.pixabay.com. Pixabay probably offers the most extensive library of photos, so the chances of finding the image you are looking for are high. Through Pixabay, you can also search for stock videos, something that is less often offered for free! And if you make beautiful photos yourself and want to share them through a stock photo site, you can submit your work to Pixabay!

 ✔ Large selection

✔ Stock videos

✘ Due to large selection, not always good quality

StockSnap

And last but not least, www.stocksnap.io, where you can also search for trending photos by date. StockSnap also offers many different types of stock photos, shown through collections and a search filter. The results you get in StockSnap include free downloadable images but also photos you have to pay for. The watermark of Shutterstock is shown in the pictures you have to pay for so you can immediately see if it is a free image or not.

 ✔ Extensive search filter

✔ Overview free vs. paid

✘ Due to large selection, not always good quality

Extra: The site with constant quality

Our absolute recommendation for images and what we frequently use is Canva, where you will find lots of pictures and incredibly simple infographics, logos, and other designs.

iStockphoto

As you can read above, there are plenty of sites with free photos, but you will have to spend money if you want consistently good quality. My favorite paid stock photo site is www.istockphoto.com. The nice thing about this site is the way the fees are structured. You can download a single image for about 9 euros, but you can also download multiple photos at once for a reduced rate. If you buy several credits at once, you can get as much as €6 per image. iStock is also great to use if you are a starting entrepreneur or a designer who only needs a few photos. What is also very convenient is that iStock has an app so you can search for the perfect stock photos even faster from your cell phone!

 ✔ Most professional supply of photos

✔ Buy one image once or multiple credits for an extra discount

✔ Useful app