On this one, I’ll like to share with you my top 5 sources for both personal and professional use of royalty-free stock photos.
Symbols produced and uploaded by graphic designers all around the world are collected and cataloged on the website known as The Noun Project. The Los Angeles-based initiative serves as a reference for those looking for typographic symbols as well as a record of the genre’s design history.
Sofya Polyakov, Edward Boatman, and Scott Thomas are the other co-founders of The Noun Project, which is led by Polyakov. Boatman recounted his disappointment at the lack of a central repository for popular icons, “things such as airplanes, bicycles, and people,” when he was working at an architectural firm. That concept evolved into a bigger visual communication platform. With emblems from the National Park Service and other sources whose information was in the public domain, the website was launched on Kickstarter in December 2010 and garnered more than $14,000 in donations. Simple.Honest.Work, a company, designed the website with assistance from the Designer Fund.
The Noun Project has held a number of “Iconathons,” the first of which was held in the summer of 2011. These events have sparked interest and led to the creation of new symbols. Graphic designers, concept experts, and interested volunteers work in small groups throughout the sessions, which are typically five hours long and concentrate on a particular topic like democracy, transportation, or nutrition. Chacha Sikes, a fellow at Code for America at the time, had the concept for the event.
2. Nappy.co
Free, lovely images of Black and Brown folks. both for professional and private use.
Companies and company owners are trying to engage in this shift in whatever ways they can as we witness a change in this country to better racial relations. Participating in the stock photo market is one way. Black-owned company Nappy.co strives to accurately portray Black people in the world of stock images, where people of color are glaringly and even humorously underrepresented. Beautiful, high-resolution photos of Black people going about their daily lives — running, walking, eating, hanging out — can be seen on Nappy.co. These photos are available for free download, modification, distribution, and sharing; photo credit is not necessary (but highly advised!).
3. Unsplash.com
Unsplash is a website where stock photos are shared using the Unsplash license. Getty Images has owned it since 2021. According to the website, there are over 265,000 contributing photographers, and their increasing collection of more than 3.48 million photographs receives more than 16 billion monthly photo impressions. Forbes, CNET, Medium, Entrepreneur Magazine and The Next Web have all named Unsplash as one of the top photography websites in the world.
Photographers can post their images to Unsplash’s website, where a group of photo editors will curate them. Unsplash has grown to be one of the top online photo suppliers thanks to the permissive copyright rules on its images, and publications commonly use photos taken by its members. However, they faced backlash when they decided to stop utilizing a Creative Commons Zero license in 2017 since it removed almost 200,000 photos from the commons. Use on websites like Wikipedia is prohibited by the Unsplash license’s incompatibility with Creative Commons licensing.
Unsplash changed its license terms in February 2018 to make it illegal to sell photos that haven’t been updated, modified, or otherwise given new creative elements. This includes selling photos as prints or printed on tangible objects.
Unsplash for Brands, which enables advertisers to share branded photos on Unsplash, was introduced in December 2019.
Unsplash made the announcement that Getty Images would be purchasing it in March 2021.
4. Pixabay.com
This is a website featuring free stock photos and royalty-free material. Under the distinctive Pixabay license, which generally allows the free use of the content with some restrictions, it is used to share pictures, vector graphics, movie clips, music, and illustrations.
In November 2010, in Ulm, Germany, Hans Braxmeier and Simon Steinberger established the website.
Prior to January 9, 2019, Pixabay photos were made available under the CC0 license, which turns their content into the public domain. It applied a special, more stringent license that day to all of its content. It modified its license to the “Pixabay License,” which forbids the distribution of the licensed works as stock photos or wallpapers as well as the selling of unaltered copies of those works. Images that had already been made available under CC0 prior to the change in the license are still accessible through numerous mirrors distributed under the old CC0 declaration because the provisions of CC0 expressly state that the submission into the public domain is “irrevocable” once completed.
Pixabay and Pexels were both purchased by the Australian design and publishing platform Canva in May 2019.
5. Pexels.com
Stock images and stock video are available from Pexels. It was established in Germany in 2014 and currently has over 3.2 million free stock images and movies in its database.
Ingo and Bruno Joseph, identical twin brothers, created Pexels in Fuldabrück, Hesse. In 2014, the brothers launched the portal with about 800 photographs. Daniel Frese has been a member of the team since 2015. Pexels was purchased by the visual design platform Canva in 2018.
That concludes this post. Please share your thoughts about these websites and how useful they have been for your creative journey in the comments box below.
