If you are a designer like me, chances are you are in need of high quality images for different purposes — be it while designing a webpage, where you need placeholder images; or for a print mock-up — a card, flyer or a poster. I cannot narrow it down to a particular process but the truth is you badly need a high quality picture.

At first you try with Google images. You select large images, maybe up to 15MP and try in that criteria. What do you get? If you are lucky enough you get some handy not-so-bad. But are you legally allowed to use it? We don’t think a lot about a silly image at the moment. So we go ahead and use an image that comes in our way.

Let’s take an example. I was told to design a website. I search for related images and use some images from Google images and use them in the webdesign. I code it and put online to show it to the client. The project is completed, and goes live. Maybe the client did like the image used and opted not to change it with another. Or maybe he thought the price for a stock image is too high. Thus the image which you had no rights to keep or put remains in the design.

Some of the consequences that could occur if you had used a stock image is that, the person or an entity that owns the rights the image could sue you for using their property (in this case their image) without their consent. Now, let’s not discuss about the legal battle that can happen. Instead the point here is to always go for stock free images for our purposes. There are dozens of website (to my knowledge as of now) that offer free ultra high-quality photos. For every naive user’s better understanding they even write down

“do anything with them” or “use it the way you want it”

I’ve made a list of websites that I refer these days for stock free photos. Listed below:

1. Freeimages
2. Gratisography
3. Magdeleine
4. Unsplash
5. Litte Visuals

I’ll update the list with whichever good and new services that come by. So keep checking back again.