Because ain’t nobody got time to search more than 10 sites.
At Raydar, as a search engine for stock photos, we strive to do 2 things well:
- Build an awesome (accurate) search engine + great UI/X
- Work with high quality stock photo partners/sources
Thus, we are regularly sourcing and reviewing stock photo brands and resources that we can work with, doing our best to provide tremendous value to our users who use Raydar on a daily basis.
Over the years, with the increase in popularity and quality of free stock photos, there has also been an increase in the number of “free stock photo” sites, and for good reason: the demand for stock photos seems to be higher than ever, with new applications in social media and other forms of online advertising.
But not all free stock photo websites/resources are made equal. Some are not updated as regularly, some require you to sign up before you can download, some do not have photos that are of aesthetically strong. So as a search engine aggregator, we decided to curate and list our top 10 all time favourite (as of March 2017) free stock photo sources and briefly explain why we love working with them. (and obviously you can search them all at once on Raydar)
5 MUST HAVE criterias to be qualified as a good free stock photos site:
- Must have own photos (aggregators like Raydar won’t be listed, only those with own photos. E.g. Pexels)
- Must NOT require sign up or account creation to search/download photos
- Must have high resolution, high commercial value photos
- Quantity of database (should have a strong community of contributing photographers)
- CC0 (must be ok to be used for commercial projects)
So, Our Top 10 Favourite Free Stock Photo Sites
(in no particular order)
- Unsplash (community based, mostly unique photos)
- Pexels (aggregator + community)
- Pixabay (aggregator + community — includes vectors and illustrations)
- Bossfight (independently managed)
- Negative space (community based)
- Free Nature Stock (independently managed, nature photography focused)
- StockSnap (curated collection + community)
- MMT (independently managed, mostly unique photos)
- Realistic Shots (independently managed, unique photos)
- Freestocks (independently managed)
BOOM.
But wait, that’s not all. Obviously there has to be a bit of a shameless (but adds lots of value to you) plug. Here goes…
A. We are putting together a list of “Top 700 Free Stock Photos EVER”, SIGN UP HERE if you want to get on that awesome mailing list.
B. If you find that searching through these 10 different sites take up alot of precious time, try searching all of them at once with Raydar! This is the reason why we built a stock photo search engine in the first place.
Have fun and create something awesome!
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