This Forgotten Website Provides You With 78 Million Free Images

Ayoub Bouamri
New Writers Welcome
4 min readNov 24, 2021

The majority of Medium and Vocal writers are using Unsplash by default. This website has many creative photographers. However, its content is limited. Most of the time, we do not find suitable photos for our stories. After clicking next thousands of times, we lose hope and go with a general random image of a cute dog.

Photo by Usen Parmanov on Unsplash

Another problem of Unsplash is the overuse of the same photos. This is monotonous and uncreative. We may write unique stories, but when we employ an overused image, we lose the chance to stand out.

In this article, I will provide you with an amazing website. It contains all images you need. And definitely, a website that you already know but you never thought about using for this purpose.

P.S. keep reading until the end. I will provide you with additional websites.

The website I am talking about is Wikimedia Commons. The only source that Wikipedia uses to generate media files for millions of articles. On the main page of Wikimedia Commons, you will find this phrase, a collection of 78,914,174 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

Pros of Wikimedia Commons:

A tremendous amount of images: Unlike Unsplash (and every similar website), Wikimedia Commons has millions of photos taken by millions of people in millions of locations. Images of festivals, body organs, remote Amazigh villages, celebrities, sports tournaments, protests, unknown dances, portrayals, etc. No matter what topic you are writing about, there are suitable images for you on Wikimedia Commons. And this leads us to the next pro.

Variety of categories: Unsplash can provide you with images of limited categories like tech, animals, and laughing people. These categories are awesome but not enough. Wikimedia Commons, on the other side, has thousands of categories. Fundamentally, anything you can think about is available on Wikimedia Commons.

Images of celebrities: Let us say we are writing an article about LeBron James. The title and body are ready. Now it is time to find an attractive image for the article. You type LeBron James on Unsplash, and here is what you get.

A picture of a squirrel. What does this have to do with our topic? We are looking for an image of LeBron James. Here comes the role of Wikimedia Commons. The website will provide you with free and professional photos of LeBron James.

Local content: This is the most feature I love about Wikimedia Commons. While Unsplash provides general images that could be used for vast common topics, Wikimedia Commons offers local content. Let us assume that we are not writing about rock music, which is famous worldwide. We are writing about Amazigh music, which is only known in North Africa. To be more specific, we will write about Idir (a Kabyle singer-songwriter and musician). Here is what each platform can deliver à propos this topic.

Unsplash:

Wikimedia Commons:

Cons of Wikimedia Commons

Images quality: Not all images have high quality. Wikimedia Commons is a website that anyone could contribute to it. So there are images taken by professional photographers and others taken by amateurs.

Lack of image retouching: There is a lack of Photoshop usage. Probably, this is a policy of the website, which is more academic than commercial. However, if you think that an image needs some edits, you can edit it yourself.

How to download images from Wikimedia Commons

1. Go to the official website: commons.wikimedia.org

2. Type your keywords in the search bar.

3. Click on License and choose: Use with attribution and same license.

4. Click on the image you like > More details.

5. Click download

How to attribute the author

Stay on the page of the last step and scroll down. You will find the author’s instructions. Essentially, you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. The subtitle of the below picture demonstrates a vivid example.

Photo by Lhossine on Wikimedia Commons

Bonus: Extra websites

There are many websites similar to Unsplash. This list contains three of the best websites that provide authors with free stock photos.

Pixabay

Pexels

Freepik

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Ayoub Bouamri
Ayoub Bouamri

Written by Ayoub Bouamri

Top Writer on Medium. I will teach you how to use Medium like a PRO. I also talk about human rights, languages, and culture.

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