Reasons for using/not using free image services

Eliane Fonseca
Sep 9, 2018 · 2 min read

After reading and doing researches about stock images on the web, I found that there are many free and commercial websites, with different funcionality.

So, this article lists the pros and cons of free services.

I actually got the idea of this article, in my mind, and based on what has been researched

“rocky shore during daytime” by Michele Marri on Unsplash

The pros:

  1. They can be often used without giving attribution: This is required in several sites, but this is a great forward step of many free stock image services.
  2. They are also used by large companies around the world, even through the usage of commercial stock image websites rising.
  3. The licensing of such services is completely free, and no need to pay or have licenses expiring after a period.

The cons:

  1. The content may be still protected, the case of people images and images of monuments. In this case you need to (especially when using them commercially) ask for a permission (often called model-release for images of people, and property-release for places or other objects.)
  2. Many free stock image websites may list few (or no) images compared to commercial or equivalent ones
  3. People may spend more time finding images on free websites. This does happen on any (most) websites with free content.

Also, when websites and apps uses these images, several others may use the same. You should search on the web for checking websites that uses the same images as others. This often does not happen with commercial image services.


I have seen many commercial services but I prefer more free services than commercial ones.

And now, that you alread may know some of the reasons for using free stock image services, let’s check some of my favorite image topics:

“brown house surrounded trees” by Markus Bürkle on Unsplash
“close up photo of body of water” by Ryan Loughlin on Unsplash

And, the best websites for free images : Pexels, UnSplash (my favorite), and I would not forgot PixaBay. The image that I most viewed: Unsplash link.

I may switch to commercial stock images, sooner or later.

Thanks for reading!

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